Hand to Hand
by Lesera128
Summary: 10 weeks after the birth of their daughter, tensions are running high. Booth, worried about his past catching up with his family, ends up sparring with Brennan when she challenges him to face the past and their future head on. Bones/Angel crossover. Very AU. Final sequel in the nine-part story arc that includes such stories as: "Toe to Toe" & "A Would-be Reunion."
1. Pt 1: A Staring Contest

**Hand to Hand**

**By:** dharmamonkey & Lesera128

**Rated: **M

**Disclaimer: **Here we posit our normal rigmarole. No, we don't own anything from _Bones _or _Angel... _or anything else. Yes, we're wreaking what havoc we can with these characters that we don't own to create an awesome story. But, since it's only for the purposes of creative enjoyment and amusing distraction, we think we're okay. Are there any other questions? No? ::blinks:: Good. Then, moving on―

**Summary: **Ten weeks after the birth of their daughter, tensions are running high. Booth, worried about his past catching up with his family, ends up sparring with Brennan when she challenges him to face the past and their future head-on. Bones/Angel crossover. Very, very AU and definitely M. Final story in the nine-part story arc that includes: "Toe to Toe," "Barging In," "Making Him Beg," "Comfort on the Edge of Reason," "The After Party," "The Price to Be Paid," "Echoes True and False," and "A Would-be Reunion."

**Logistical Notes: **For those who are wondering, this story would be set roughly sometime during the second half of season 4 of _Bones_. And, yes, still, for those who know of Whedon-verse, this story still assumes the events through the end of Angel's series finale ("Not Fade Away") and the comic-book "Angel: After the Fall" are canon. It ignores all other stories in the Angel chronology, including the BTVS Season 8 in comics.

**A/N: **A year and over one million words later (seriously—check the math yourself!) we didn't think we'd finally get here, but here we are. The final part, part #9, in our Angel/Bones crossover. Are you excited? Because as nervous as we are to be wrapping things up, we're pretty damn excited about this new story...and hope you are too. So, without further ado, off we go.

**UNF Alert:**Nope. Not this part. But, come on, folks. This is a Dharmasera piece, so you know it's coming...eventually. And, when it does, you *know* it'll be good...

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**Part I: A Staring Contest**

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An intense pair of blue eyes stared, unblinking, at a curious pair of lighter blue eyes that also refused to blink. After a moment, it turned out to be a wonderfully enigmatic smile that caused the bigger and more intense pair of blue eyes to finally blink as their owner looked away first with a grunt. Said grunt of displeasure and annoyance was followed by a _very _loud squeal of unadulterated pleasure. The squeal seemed to the loser in the impromptu staring contest to be added for only one reason: maliciousness. Possibly, he conceded, it was a way for her to gloat at him over her victory. In either case, the sound that had emanated from the infant car seat that sat in the middle of the front hood of a blue Ford Mustang convertible made the vampire known as Spike shiver.

"I don't like her," he grumbled, tilting his head over to look at the other man who stood leaning next to the front of the car as watching the exchange with mild amusement and some small measure of interest. Spike's face hardened as he pointed at the car seat. "I don't give a fiver if everyone's s'posed to love little cute and cuddly sprogs like her or not. I've made my decision, and that's it. Decision's made. No changes, do-overs, or take-backs. I don't like her, not one bloody bit."

Seeley Booth quirked an amused brow, watching his daughter wave her tiny, chubby arms as she warbled and babbled at the fair-eyed man with the sharp features who stood in front of the car and glowered at the infant with a distinctive curl to his lip. Booth couldn't help but smile at the infant and the way a little swirl of her silky baby hair curled in the middle of her forehead. He reclined against the fender, one hand stuffed in the pocket of his dark blue jeans as he reached up and threaded his other hand through his hair, which stuck up in several different directions since his hair gel had long since evaporated and rubbed away. He glanced once more at his cooing child, then turned and leveled his gaze at Spike, his grandchilde, who was made a vampire by Drusilla, who he himself had turned in 1860, the same fateful year he met Brennan.

"What do you mean you don't like her?" he asked with a grin, his voice edged with barely-suppressed laughter. "Why not?"

"Because," Spike replied instantly, his voice quick as he rattled off his answer. "First," he said with a sharp jab of his thumb in the general direction of the car seat. "From the first minute you took the squealing offspring out of the car, and she set those beady little eyes of hers on me, I could tell she was gonna get off on tryin' to wind me up just like you've always have when you want to toss your rocks off, Liam—"

Distracted as he was with Spike's description of his daughter, Booth chuckled, recalling how minutes earlier, he'd thrown the Mustang into park and stepped out of the car. He'd wondered as he was getting ready back at the loft what his old sometimes friend and almost-always rival would say about his new look. Some things hadn't changed—he still wore chunky-soled leather oxfords with his dark jeans—but he dressed more casually, wearing a button-down dress shirt over a slightly-rumpled T-shirt. Even more than that, though, he carried himself with more levity and a bit less of the brooding gravity that he used to, and he'd seen the subtle flash of Spike's eyebrows when he climbed out of car and walked around to the other side to retrieve his daughter from the back seat.

But it was only when he'd lifted the car seat out that Spike's pale blue eyes had suddenly widened with surprise. _"Whatcha doin' there, Peaches?" _he'd asked. _"Don't tell me you've been reduced to babysittin' for your beer money now?" _

_The demon scrunched his nose when he finally confirmed that the scent__**, **__like brown sugar with a vaguely floral undertone__**—**__which had initially taken him so completely by surprise that its very existence puzzled him as the car had pulled up__**—**__was in fact, coming from the presence of a human child...and a __very__ young one at that. Setting aside the fact he had no reason to understand what his grandsire would be doing with a child at such an hour, he was further perplexed by the uniqueness of the scent. While he'd instantly recognized the smell, there was something about it that struck him as odd, a hint of something almost like sage, which made it seem even more strange since he seemed to remember that sage was used to ward off evil. Even more so, behind the scent of sage, Spike could've sworn that he smelled the dark musk of an ancient evil. Those two things together gave the child an odor that was familiar to him, even as he struggled to figure out where he'd smelled this curious mixture before—the swirl of sage with a hint of dark musk, untainted by the citrusy note of human fear—although the more he struggled, the more he found himself unable to place it. The scents brought to mind another place and another time, another world where the nights were illuminated by gaslights and the evenings still bustled with the sound of carriage wheels and the clomping hooves of horses, although he couldn't figure out why his mind would take him back to the days when he'd been a human. _

_After a minute, he suddenly remembered where he'd last smelled the scent of sage—and he was simultaneously rather proud of himself and amazed he'd remembered such a random fact. But as he sniffed the air again, he knew there could be no mistaking __that__ particular scent. It had clung to him for three weeks, filling his nostrils every day that he'd suffered the indignity of a witch's hex after unwisely mouthing off about her generous breasts and the mouth that seemed continually latched onto them. He grumbled under his breath at the memory of it, and then remembered how that same sage-like note had clung to his grandsire's body whenever he came in from a night (or two or three or four or more) spent in the company of said witch, still discernable even amid the thick, dark, earthy scent of malice and depravity that always signaled his grandsire's return. He couldn't shake the idea that the dark, musky odor that rolled off the man he now watched was perhaps a lingering residue left behind by the centuries of mayhem that a century of ensoulment and reform couldn't quite wash away._

_Shrugging off the thought, Spike narrowed his eyes and watched as Booth reached into the backseat and unlatched the car seat from its anchors. Once he saw the car seat pulled out of the back of the convertible, he couldn't wipe away the twisted grimace of disgust that spread across his lips at seeing his once ferociously vicious grandsire toting around a mewling baby in a car seat. He'd snickered with a shake of his blond head, "How far the mighty have fallen, ehh?" _

_He watched as Booth reached into the car seat and readjusted the tiny occupant's blanket, tucking it under her little arms as she woke up, murmured and started to wave her arms. "So, wait," Spike snorted. "Is that what this is all about, Angel? Are we back to this old song and dance? Savin' babies like ya did back when we was back in China? Because don't think I've forgotten, mate, that even back then ya had a thing for babies, huh?" _

_Spike's dark eyebrows arched as he looked back at Booth, his blue eyes alight with laughter as he pursed his lips the way he always did when he was teeing up a sarcastic quip. Booth hated that look, the same way he'd __always__ hated the look. Booth's shoulders tensed at the sight of it, reminding him how that look alone made his blood boil, the same way it had since the earliest days after Drusilla had brought her wavy-locked, bespectacled creation into their home in 1880. _Yup,_ he thought. He hated it then, and he __still__ hated it now even as he found himself ticking another check mark in a long column of reasons as to why the blond vampire had always pissed him off by continually running off at the mouth. _

"_As I recall," Spike continued, "it was 'specially grand when you could play the knight in shinin' armor for the missionary kind, yeah? Pure as the driven snow. All cooin' and innocent and so bloody sweet. Don't tell me that after all this time, ya still want to pick 'em up and hold 'em in your arms and save 'em from all the mean 'n' nasties like me, huh?"_

_Booth rolled his eyes. _I should've figured he'd be a schmuck about this, _he grumbled under his breath. _I don't know why I figured he'd be a fucking grown-up and be reasonable about this after all this time. _He set the car seat on the hood of the car, gently so as to not send its mellowly-murmuring occupant into a fit of bawling. He closed his eyes and shook his head, wondering if it was possible for his grandchilde to refrain from being an asshole, even if only for a couple of minutes. Booth chided himself for naively thinking, or at least hoping, that Spike would pass on an opportunity not to bust his balls—somehow foolishly letting himself think that, even while he had changed and wasn't the same kind of guy he used to be, for some reason the same might be true of Spike. _Nope, not Spike_, he thought. _He's never been the responsible type and never will be.

His thoughts turning back to what was presently going on in front of him, it took Booth a minute to catch on to the name Spike had just called him. The small smile on his face disappeared and was quickly replaced with an annoyed frown. It was no surprise to hear Spike toss out a tired, timeworn insult as if nothing had changed, leading Booth to privately wonder if, at least as far as Spike was concerned, anything really had_. _

Booth stared at him for a moment, then shook his head and thought, _No, probably not._ He then let out a puff of breath, more of a grunt than a sigh as he formulated his reply.

"_Liam?_" he huffed. "Aww, what? Don't tell mepoor wee Willy's got his knickers in a twist simply because he got stared down by a baby and blinked first?" He shook his head again and snickered. "Man...that's pretty pathetic, even for you, Spike."

Spike narrowed his eyes, his mouth twisted into a scowl as he shrugged off the interruption. "But, assuming that she's actually yours—which I doubted when I first saw her since we all know the scrawny bints with big foreheads and bigger overbites that you normally spawn, and she's actually not too bad lookin' as far as babies go—but now that I've spent five minutes with her, I'm starting to see the resemblance..."

"Not too bad?" Booth snapped, his heavy brow furrowing as he turned and looked at the baby, who sat in her car seat and appeared to watch the two men banter with a murmur of amusement. Turning back to the vampire, he frowned as Spike's implied insult finally worked its way into his tired brain. "Wait," he said defensively. "What'd'ya mean 'assuming she's yours,' you prick? Of course she's mine, you jagoff. I mean, what? You aren't accusing Bren of fooling around behind my back, are ya? Because if you are, I don't think I have to remind you about the—" Booth stopped and made a gesture that looked lewd as he did so from his forehead.

Spike seemed to lose a touch of his bravado when he saw the gesture that Booth had made. He narrowed his eyes and grunted as he watched Booth's jaw tick with a tension that belied his teasing tone.

"Well," he mused, a sly grin spreading across his face. "No, not that it's any of _your_ business, you pillock, but I don't need any remindin' about _that _because Brennan and I came to an understanding between _us _a long time ago, boyo." He made a low humming sound in his throat as he looked down at his feet, his forehead creasing as he raised his brows, waiting for Booth to react as he knew he would. "A _very _mutually beneficial understanding, mind ya, so I don't think I need to be worryin' about anything that she'll be doin' to me or not unless I want it to happen, ya know?"

"An understanding?" Booth hissed, his heavy brow sloping low over his dark eyes. "What the fuck, Spike?" He spat out his grandchilde's name, his voice dripping with venom as he felt his arms and shoulders tighten with rising anger. "What kind of understanding?"

Spike grinned crookedly, unable to resist the temptation to crank his grandsire up like a life-sized jack-in-the-box, knowing as he did exactly how to rouse his anger. "No worries, mate," the vampire said with a laugh. "Really, Angel, you know better than anyone that Brennan doesn't like it when people tell tales out of school about her comings...and goings." Spike only added the last two words when he saw Booth's nostrils begin to flare. "But, just to make a liar of your poncy self, I'll say this," Spike said. He narrowed one eye as the other one twinkled beneath a sharply quirked eyebrow that seemed to leap from his face, so stark was the contrast between its dark color and the bright platinum blonde of his frosted, spiked hair. The corner of his lip twitched with a faint smirk as his gaze flickered with barely-restrained laughter. "Just think of things this way," he continued. "We're even, you know, after all that bollocks you put me through with you an' Dru all them years ago." He nodded as his smirk grew. "Yeah, what was it you said to me, when I came in and found you with my Dru? Hmm?"

Booth's jaw hardened to stone as he shot Spike a chilling, almost expressionless glare. He, too, remembered the conversation as if it were yesterday.

"_Why did you...?" William had asked him, his voice edged with frustration as his eyes glimmered with unhidden hurt. "You knew," he insisted. "You __knew__ she was mine."_

_Angelus smirked back at the younger vampire as he shrugged his shoulders in a clearly dismissive way. "Did I?"_

"_You knew bloody well!" William barked, wrenching himself free of his grandsire's grasp before rearing his arm back and slugging him. _

_With a roll of his eyes, Angelus easily deflected William's clumsy blow, then shoved his smaller, younger rival to the floor. "Just don't get it now, do ya?" he asked the starry-eyed new vampire. Jerking William up by his lapels, he threw him on the couch, then shoved the two corpses that lay there off, watching indifferently as the empty husks of their humanity dropped to the floor before cheerfully taking his seat next to his grandchilde. _

"_Aye," Angelus began. "Well, you're new... and a little dim. So let me explain to you how things are now." He looked directly into the other vampire's eyes before he nodded. "There's no belongin' or deservin' anymore," he said as if he was reciting his A-B-C's. "Ya can take what ya want, have what ya want..." he said simply. "But nothing is yours." He paused at the exact moment that Drusilla appeared in the doorway almost as if they'd perfectly choreographed her arrival. He then looked back at Spike, a small smirk playing on his lips as he grunted quietly and said, "Not even her."_

"Not even her," Spike snorted a laugh, and in that moment Booth wasn't clear if he was speaking about Drusilla...or someone else. "Yeah, boyo," Spike snickered. "You sure did think you read me the ol' riot act that there night, huh?" He looked at the floor as he shook his head slowly, continuing on more for himself then for Booth's benefit. "No ownership, no possessions, right?" he repeated, the words coming off his Cockney tongue so easily that Booth instantly knew this was a rant that the vampire had practiced, both in his mind and verbally, many times over the years. "'No belongin' or deservin' anymore.' Right, yeah?" He suddenly looked up from the ground and gave Booth a nod with a sharp upward jerk of his chin before his eyes narrowed as did his tone. "But that was all a bunch of bollocks, too, wasn't it? Just like all the other tripe you've tried to feed me over the years, yeah? 'Cause you thought what _you_ had did belong to you even if it wasn't. An' even more then that, I had the balls to follow yer own teachin's on that point, huh? But you were a day late and five quid short on that one even by then, don't ya know it, 'cause me and the fine Miss Brennan had already gotten well-acquainted by that point," he said as he nodded at Booth. "She's a very fine woman, that one," he said, the mock tone that had disappeared from his voice infuriating Booth more than anything he'd said to that point. "Smart and pretty, well-heeled and fashionable," he added. "But above all else..." His voice trailed off as he smirked at his grandsire. "Well, how shall I say..." He paused for what was clearly dramatic emphasis before he smirked. "Aww, come on, Angel. You know what I mean," he said. As he continued to what his now human grandsire continue to fume, Spike was unable to avoid temptation as he continued to rub it in as he gave Booth another look. "I mean, come on, Captain," he nodded, a muted reference to the insult he'd often sling at Angel over the years when he'd referred to him as Captain Forehead. "I know you've always been slow on the uptake when it comes to these things, but don't tell me that I need to spell it out for you now, do I?

Trying to keep his calm, Booth cracked his knuckles as he growled through gritted teeth, "What are you talking about, Spike?"

Spike's eyes narrowed again and he smiled, running his tongue along the edge of his teeth in an almost suggestive gesture before speaking again. "You can just consider us—you an' me—even-steven ya know, after your mix-up with Dru and all." He paused for a moment, pursing his lips for a second before letting a wry grin spread across his lips. "Oh, and by the by, in case you're wonderin', boyo..." He let his voice trail off for a bit before he added, "I _don't _mean Buffy." He nodded before some of the viciousness left his gaze and he took on a slightly more familiar if cavalier attitude. "So, anyways, I say, let bygones be bygones, mate, but given all of _that_, you really can't blame me for havin' questions as to who might've spawned this wee tyke—and that has nothing to do with her mam's choice in men—but more like it's 'cause she seems to be a decent-enough looking thing, so that's really too much so for me to believe she's the fruit of your slimy loins."

"Screw you," Booth muttered, feeling his anger crackle barely checked through his limbs. He opened his mouth to say something, but then caught himself as he realized that he was playing right into Spike's hand by letting the vampire's taunts and insinuations get under his skin. Booth rolled his shoulders back and stood up straighter as he pushed himself off the fender of the car and said, "My kid's gorgeous, not that you'd even know a good-lookin' baby if she spit up on you, which she won't, because I don't intend to let you and your grubby, bloodsucking mitts get a step closer to her—or anything else that belongs to me, for that matter—than you are right now."

"You and your possessions," the vampire snorted. "The rules were always different for you, huh?" Spike shook his head with a growl of indignant disgust as he still vividly remembered the confrontation the two men had a century ago about boundaries and ownership.

_Angelus stood nose to nose with his grandchilde, his nostrils flaring as they filled with the smell of her, a smell that clung to William and swirled with the scent of the nervous young vampire's sweat._

_"You made a big fuckin' mistake, boy," Angelus growled as he glared down at the shorter, slighter man from beneath heavy brows twisted with demonic rage._

_"Did I now?" William replied, his straight white teeth flashing back in a sneer. "Tell me, my Fenian friend. Yeah?"_

_"She's mine," Angelus grunted, "and you knew it. I'd ha' thought that a lettered lad like you'd ha' figured it out after spending more 'n' a fortnight walkin' around town like some sort of trick unicorn 'cause you got caught flappin' your lips about her the last time, but still you went out trollin', hopin' to get under her skirts, aye? I know you did because you haven't had that cock off your forehead for more than a week or two. Now listen, you little pissant. She's mine, aye? Mine and mine alone. You donna get to touch her, got it? You stay away from her."_

_William laughed, gleeful that he was eliciting such a response from the elder vampire. "Bollocks, Angelus. I thought we could take what we wanted, who we wanted," he said sardonically. "No possession, no ownership. Remember? That's what you told me when I saw you shagging Dru senseless. Right? Isn't that how it is? Or do the rules not apply to you, Angelus? Is it just do as I say and not as I do?"_

_Angelus reached out and grabbed a fistful of William's shirt as he opened his mouth with a metallic snarl. "When it comes to you and me, boy," he said. "These are the rules. Mistress Brennan is __mine__. You touch her again, mmm? I'll fuckin' kill you. I made the one who made you. I can unmake you just like that." He punctuated his point with a sharp snap of his fingers using his free hand. "Now, if you're as smart as you claim to be, Wee Willie, I suggest you listen good." He hauled the poet-turned-vampire to tips of his feet until their eyes met one another, pure hatred staring back at each man. "You touch her again, huh, and you can take that to the fuckin' bank, William. I'll end you. Don't touch her. Don't visit her. Don't e'en think about her. Stay away from her. Stay outta my affairs. Go near her again, and you'll be dust before the next dawn. There won't be any other warnin's, lad, so do we understand each other or not? She's mine."_

Spike blinked away the memory and watched Booth standing there, glancing at his baby girl out of the corner of his eye before he brought his angry gaze up to meet Spike's.

Booth's dark brows sloped low over his eyes as he scowled, wanting nothing more than to serve Spike a knuckle sandwich for insulting him, his woman, and his children. He clenched both his fists by his side as he stilled his hands as he looked over at his infant daughter who seemed to be watching him with her mother's same critical stare. The baby's presence diluted some of the anger he felt just a bit, and he almost completely sobered when a father's affection combined with the thought of how Brennan would know that he'd done more than just taken a fussy baby for a calming late night ride if he came home with a bloody nose and a black eye. However, still feeling the need to let Spike's latest taunt go unanswered, Booth decided that tossing a few more verbal insults at the blond vampire wasn't going too far afield.

Shaking his head, Booth said, "You're still pissy about little kids because they remind you of what a worthless pussy you were, traipsing around Spitalfields with Drusilla having to have her help you find a decent supper because you were incapable of catching yourself anything but schoolboys out past light's out and fourteen year-old runaways trolling the streets for a well-dressed john." A crooked smirk cracked his lips as he saw anger flicker in Spike's pale eyes and congratulated himself for winding up his irritating grandchilde to the point that he'd gotten Spike _that _worked up. Nodding at Spike, he decided one final warning was in order to let the vampire know that he was done joking around. "Point is, Wee Willie, this is _my _kid, and you're not touching her or _anything else_ that belongs to me, _ever_, so _back off_."

This time, it was Spike's turn to snarl and stare. His nostrils flared once, and his brow thickened, and his now-yellowed eyes glared back at his grandsire as his lips curled back, revealing two rows of jagged teeth framed by a pair of ivory fangs. For a long moment, he watched Booth, the smell of him reminding Spike that his old rival was a human, more or less like any other mortal man, but yet there was something about him—the distinct absence of the citrusy smell of fear, and even more than that, a murmur that the vampire could hear in the pause between heartbeats—that made Spike wonder whether his grandsire was, despite appearances, entirely human. He gazed bitterly into Booth's dark brown eyes and remembered the nearly twenty years they'd rampaged together through Europe, leaving a bloody trail in their wake, and he remembered the possessive anger that flashed in those eyes when his grandsire felt that Spike had trod too close to the one thing which Angelus claimed as his and his alone. The vampire's broad nostrils flared as he once more detected the peppery, spicy smell of anger tinged with the familiar hint of dark musk, and remembered the many times he ran through the streets, cloaked in night, fueled by hunger and inspired by the way Angelus brought viciousness to the level of performance art.

He wondered whether he was merely experiencing a twisted sort of sensory nostalgia, or if the dark streak of viciousness still raged somewhere deep inside the man who stood before him. He blinked away the thought as his eyes darted over to the baby, and he mentally chided himself. _Naaw. No mere human shell could keep him caged up if he were in there somewhere. Angelus is gone, _he told himself. _No more. Not comin' back. Done. Thank the bloody stars._

"Don't forget, Gramps, that _you're _the one who asked _me _here, not the other way around," Spike growled as his yellow eyes flashed brightly for a split second and then slowly faded as his forehead melted back to its normal human state. "I've got better things to do than waste the balance of an otherwise good night listening to your useless prattle, though it's true that the main reason I came was 'cause even the Big Apple can get a bit tiresome after a while and, well, because it got me to thinkin' how long it had been since I heard from my good old friend, Elphie."

Spike's teeth flashed as he used the pet name he'd come up with in recent years for Brennan even if Booth didn't quite understand what it meant or why it was appropriate. Still, Booth knew _exactly_ who he was talking about.

"It's been too long, really," Spike added with a curl of his lips, "and if you don't hurry up and get to the point, I'm outta here, and I'll be quite happy to knock off without lookin' like I've been put through the ringer just in case you got off a _very _lucky shot." He paused, rolling his once-again pale blue eyes as he shook his head with a disdainful snort. "So, just in case you're wondering, I'm not really here to kick your ass up and down the District." He paused and lifted his right hand to his face as he looked like he'd suddenly took an interest in his nails as he flicked his fingers even as his tone shifted and his body language relaxed a bit. "You know, Angel, you may think you're all that and a proverbial bag of crisps, but you're not not as smart, suave or charming as that super-sized effin' ego of yours has always made you think you are," the blond vampire said. "You weren't then, and you sure as hell aren't now. You're _still _not worth it. So just stuff it, okay?"

Spike then jabbed his finger in the air in Booth's general direction to emphasize his point before he added, "Besides, don't go gettin' yourfrilly knickers in a twist. All I meant to say was—that one there? Well, I don't like her because even a dead guy like me can see that one there's an old soul. And, I don't trust old souls since they always think they can get one over on you just because they're so effin' sure of themselves."

As he continued to speak, building up a certain momentum, Spike almost seemed to forget Booth was there as he ticked off his other reasons using his fingers.

"Second, she's a watcher, and while I don't necessarily mean Watcher like future-mentor of slayers-in-training Watcher, she's still a watcher. And that makes me bloody nervous because—" He stopped and turned his head so that he could speak to the occupant of the car seat. "I don't like being watched!" The only response he received was another bubbly laugh.

Shaking his head, Spike continued, "Third, what kind of kid gets off on gettin' carted around at three o'clock in the middle of the night in an friggin' Ford Mustang convertible just to muck about?" He hesitated a moment, then smirked and said, "Well, guess this isn't the first time you've spawned a runtling that likes takin' a midnight ride, huh—'cept the last time, the chariot of choice was that piece o' shite 1967 Plymouth GTX you used to have." As he kept talking, and his Cockney voice got louder and louder, his gestures became wider and more dramatic until he stood there with his arms waving wide, the open flaps of his black leather duster wagging as he flung his arms to and fro. "Holy hell, that thing was a rusty bucket o' bollocks. I don't know how many damn times my fangs almost got rattled out of my mouth because you were too much of a cheap numpty to get the suspension looked at when the shock absorbers needed fixin' and so you kept skivin' the tune-up."

Spike took a step towards the car and drew his forefingers in a gentle caress along the long, gentle curve of the hood, pausing for the briefest of seconds to note the shiny horse insignia in the center of the grille, admiring the car's lines and smooth paint with an appreciative flash of his brows. Touching the car almost as if it were a lover, he let out what sounded like a pleasurable sigh before his attention was diverted, his ice blue eyes snapping up to meet with an angry, possessive scowl as Booth stepped forward, pushing Spike to the side and positioning his tall, broad-shouldered form between the vampire and both the car and the infant as he batted Spike's hand away. Taking a step back, Spike rolled his eyes at the classically possessive gesture he'd seen his grandsire use a hundred times—whether in regard to his clothes, his son Connor, or most often, the one woman he claimed as his and his alone—but like he most often did in the end, Spike didn't challenge him on his possessive claim, but rather smirked and cast a knowing look at Booth with a chuckle.

"Gotta admit," he said with a nod. "This is a much better set of wheels. I guess it shows that the Viper wasn't a fluke when it came to if your taste was actually gettin' any better or not, huh, knobhead?"

"Hey," Booth frowned as he looked into the dense black of night and remembered the old car that Spike had teasingly referred to as the 'Angelmobile.' East Potomac Park was vacant, the air around them still with the quiet that lingers on the edge of twilight, and Washington D.C. was silent in slumber in the hours before Saturday dawned. "Though I guess I have to give you credit for having some sense seeing as how you did always have eyes for that Viper of mine..."

Letting the comment hang in the air between them, Booth thought about how Spike had more or less stolen the car once to race off into the night with the hopes of getting his hands on the purportedly magic Cup of Perpetual Torment which proved to be a hoax intended to induce Spike to kill his grandsire.

Booth set aside that memory with a quiet grunt and let his mind wander a bit, remembering how Brennan had taken a liking to the Viper back in his days at Wolfram and Hart. A faintly wicked grin spread across his face as he recalled the night she surprised him in the garage, and how hot it had been when he took her right up against the side of the black sports car in the middle of the garage. He felt a raw shiver run down his spine at the memory, recalling how he'd watched her reach under her short skirt and pull off her panties, and the way they'd laid there in a damp crumple on the concrete floor of the garage as he'd stroked his cool fingers between her warm folds to feel how soaking wet she was. He remembered nudging her legs open with a gentle shove of his forearm that he'd barely needed to make before sinking into her seconds later, and the way he'd stroked into her, one hand resting on the roof of the car and the other on the low-slung hood as he tried not to pound her too roughly into the fiberglass body of the sports car.

_Fuck that was hot, _he told himself, his jaw tensing as he tried to ignore the sharp tug of arousal that coiled deep in his belly and made his blue jeans begin to feel uncomfortably snug. _So completely and utterly fuckin' hot._

No sooner had he blinked away that memory than he recalled how Brennan had suggested a few months back that they reprise the moment.

_"If it's just a preference—and since color is just a preference, but not that big a deal—then if I told you that a black Viper was parked in the garage downstairs, you should have no problem if we went down there right now, and I wanted you to fuck me against the car, correct?" _

At the time, the notion of taking her against the side of a car in their condo's garage while she was six months pregnant made him a bit queasy. But after ten weeks without anything to ease his own substantially increasing libido but for his own hand whenever he could steal a few moments in the shower, the thought of a do-over made his balls tighten. He wondered how late at night they'd have to creep down into the garage to be assured that they could pull it off without being seen or interrupted.

_I wonder what the range is on that baby monitor with all that concrete and brick, _he thought with a smirk. _I mean, we could be quick, right? Five, six minutes, would be all we'd need...tops._

He looked up at Spike and said, "By the way, I actually have _another _Viper now, but rest assured, Spike, that hell itself will freeze over before I let you have the keys to that one." He cocked an eyebrow and watched to see if Spike would react, but instead found the vampire temporarily distracted by the warbling sounds that the infant was making as she watched the pair banter.

"Fact is, though, your like of my Viper aside, that GTX was a freakin' classic," he said with a smile, a nostalgic dreaminess he'd felt for more than one reason crept into his voice. "She didn't hold a wax as long as I'd wished she would, seeing as how the paint long ago oxidized to hell and back, but still, that car was a beaut. Not as great as the Chevelle SS I used to have. That one had a huge Chevy big-block engine and these great bench seats in the front and back, which came in awfully handy when I had a date on a Saturday night, and my Pops wasn't around to enforce my curfew."

He thought about the bench seats in the back of his old GTX. The leather upholstery had long ago begun to split and crack even before he'd picked the car up for $1,500, but that hadn't mattered much to him. He'd never rode in the backseat of his own car, and the only time he ever did use that back seat, the creases in the leather were the last thing on his mind.

He'd worked three months as a bartender at a seedy bar in Wicker Park—pouring beers and whiskeys for demons of all shapes and sizes six nights a week from shortly after dusk until an hour before dawn—to save up the money to buy the car, which Brennan had offered to buy for him, but which he'd stubbornly refused on the basis of pride. The car had seen its better days by then, but it had a certain character about it that appealed to him, never mind the car's 440 cubic inch, 378 horsepower V8, the throaty sound of which invigorated and excited Angel from the very first time he heard it.

He remembered the first time he took Brennan out for a midnight drive in the car, roaring down Lakeshore Drive on a breezy summer night as Lou Gramm crooned "I've Been Waiting for a Girl Like You" and scrambling to find a nice quiet park to dive into before her hands dove any farther into his pants. No sooner had he thrown the car into park and cut the engine then he quickly followed Brennan into the back seat, tucking himself between her legs as soon as he could slide her panties off. Whether it was the purring vibration of the car's monster engine, or the decadence of racing up the boulevard in the middle of the night with the wind in her hair, she was more than ready for him by the time he sank into her, so warm and wet and snug. The dry cracks and creases in the old leather of the seat registered vaguely in the back of his mind as his knees dug into the seat and he drove into her with firm, grunting strokes.

Clearing his throat as he shrugged away the memory and the arousing, albeit frustrating sensations it summoned to the forefront, he gave Spike a sly grin as he began to speak again.

"Those big bench seats in those classic American cars are wide enough you and your girl can get nice 'n' comfy and manage some good leverage if you know what I mean..." He saw Spike's brow furrow at his ramble as the blond vampire gave him a weird look.

"Ah," the vampire mused, as a look of comprehension suddenly dawned on his face "So is that how you got lucky this time?" Spike's brow arched expectantly as a sly smirk curved his lips, watching to see if Booth would take the bait. "Lemme guess. Somehow, you ran off at the mouth like you've always been so good at, and actually managed to coax ol' Ms. Hocus-Pocus into the backseat where you got to take her for a ride, huh, and then,_ bam_, nine months later this wee tyke came tumbling along?" His crooked-mouthed smirk widened to a toothy smile of unabashed satisfaction as he saw Booth's cheeks and ears redden at the remark. "Well, I guess gotta give credit where credit is due. I didn't think you still had it in ya to get it up and knock someone up, but seems I was wrong. Obviously, the poor bird took pity on your sorry self and saw fit to give you a round o' rumpy pumpy and, what do ya know? Ol' Muffy McBroody managed to go twelve rounds and serve up the sauce, and this wee tyke is the result. I guess I owe you an apology—you're not as much of a pouf as I thought you were." Spike paused again, then gave the bright blue convertible a long, bumper-to-bumper glance, then snorted and said, "Though I gotta say, the Mustang still strikes me as a chick's car—especially the drop-top. Seems to me that only lucious birds with nice, big, juicy knockers, happy-go-lucky poufs, and nancy-boy wankers in the throes of a mid-life crisis run out and buy a brand-new convertible." He punctuated his final words with a look that clearly insinuated at least the last two applied to Booth in some manner and that he didn't deserve Brennan if it was the first one.

His grandchilde's thinly-veiled message received, Booth shook his head and snorted before he finally replied, "For fuck's sake, Spike." He paused for a beat before he snickered with a taunting gleam in his eyes. "I mean, I know it's hard, but come on, huh? Enough already about Bren's tits..." A mischievous glint brightened Booth's dark eyes for a moment as he shrugged a little and reached up to scratch the day and a half's-worth of stubble on his jaw before he gestured with his hand. "I mean, that's not to say that they're not fucking amazing, because, hey I'm the first one to admit they are. But it's high time you get a grip and stop obsessing about them, mmm'kay?" he nodded at the vampire before he continued on. "And as for poufs, I'm not gay, but even if I was and you were the last swinging dick left on earth, I wouldn't ask you out no matter how much you're dying for me to give you a go. So best just get that one out of your sick, twisted, warped head—okay, fuckwad?—because that ain't happening. Nada. No way. Got it?"

Spike smirked and made a _pffft _sound. "You've got the wrong idea _entirely_, mate," he scoffed. "I've seen enough of your knob to last me a hundred lifetimes, alright, Peaches?" He then grunted, more under his breath so that it was low enough that the FBI agent may or may not have heard him add, "Not that I ever even _wanted _to see it, or that it was all that much to look at, mate. Talk about effin' overpromised and underdelivered. Ugghh. Thanks so much for that lastin', lingerin', horrible image..."

"Fuck you, Spike," Booth growled, his nostrils flaring as he felt the twitch of anger crackle through his limbs. "Enough. I don't want to hear it, okay? Holy hell."

The vampire shook his head and rolled a shoulder back in a feigned shudder. _For fuck's sake, _he thought with a faint wince. _I was just makin' the rounds after that tosser of a Halloween party Lorne talked his poncey self into holding and decided to pop into his office to check on the snoozing green pouf because I had nothin' better to do before shogging off to get me some shuteye myself. _ Try as he might, he couldn't rid his mind of the memory of what he'd stumbled onto that fateful night. In fact, the harder he tried not to think about it, the more persistent the image seemed to become. _I'd ha' figured he'd had enough of getting his end that night with that skank Eve, _he mused. _But no. I should've known better. The poofster never was one for moderation. So maybe I should've known better, but didn't. Because the last effin' thing I'd have expected to see was him standin' there gettin' a gobble from ol' Elphie. _Spike shuddered again as the familiar image danced before his eyes.

Shaking his head, he smirked back at Booth. "Aye, mate. Well, I daresay I'd consider it an effin' blessing if I never have to see your nasty little knob ever again." He smiled in satisfaction as he saw Booth's cheeks flush and ears redden at the insult. After a beat, he decided to lob one last zinger and added, "Emphasis still bein' on_ little_, by the by."

"Shut the fuck up, Spike," Booth grunted. "Right the fuck now, alright?" An angry growl rumbled low in his throat. After a few seconds, the anger faded and was replaced by embarrassment and a touch of indignation at being reminded that his grandchilde and rival had seen him with Dru and Darla, and—though it sickened him to think of it—countless other women he'd preyed on in the years the four of them rampaged through Europe. "You sick fucker," he huffed. "Why do you have to go and bring _that _up now?"

"_You_ were the one who started us coming 'round the mountain when she comes, mate, when you brought up Elphie's tits," Spike countered sharply. "How is that my fault?" He paused and then shook his head again. "Besides, what the bloody hell was I supposed to do? Look away when walked in and saw that thing of yours?" the vampire asked, throwing his hands up in the air in clear annoyance. "It wasn't until I was already in the room that I heard all that moanin' and groanin' and dirty talk you can't seem to get off without, huh?"

Spike rolled his eyes and smirked._ Hell, _he told himself. _Not that it was __all__ bad. The one thing that kept me from chundering right then and there was seein' Elphie on her knees wearin' only her gunties, with those fantastic knockers of hers pushed up all nice and pretty in that nice black ooh-la-la she had on...hmmm, yeah..._

He shook his head, trying again to jettison the thought, as much because he knew that no good could come of thinking about Brennan that way, especially with her overprotective and hypersensitive lover frothing at the mouth with every word that Spike uttered on the subject. _But everything else aside_, _it's just so damn easy to amp him up, _he told himself. _Just like it's always been. A century plus later, and he's still such a mark. It's like shootin' fish in a goddamn barrel. So he deserves it. _Spike flashed another look at his grandsire as he shook his head. _What a ponce._

"I mean, hell, mate," Spike said, his mouth hanging open with an almost-predatory smile as he took one last shot. "I'm the one who was left forever fuckin' scarred by the whole thing, not you. You know?"

"Don't," Booth warned. "Just...don't, okay?"

The blonde vampire shook his head with a snort. "So damn sensitive, you always have been there, Captain," Spike chided him. "I'd have figured that, with you turning over a new leaf and all, you might've got yourself a grip on things, but obviously I was wrong."

Booth's lip curled slightly in disgust though he gave no reply, his jaw stiffening as the fact that he was standing in a Washington park with his grandchilde led him to think of the latter of the two women they had both shared between them. He knew from his brief, albeit mostly unpleasant, visit from the Slayer that she'd returned from Europe since he'd left L.A. and that she was, more or less, living in New York with Spike, and while he wasn't exactly sure the nature of her current relationship with the ensouled vampire, he was fairly certain that the two were more than just a couple of roommates sharing a simple, fourth-floor walk-up studio apartment on the Upper West Side. Although he'd long known that Spike and the Slayer were, at least for a time—as much as he hated to use the word—_lovers_, he knew he couldn't deny that fact and even thinking about the mere notion of it still gave him the creeps years afterwards. The fact that the thought of her came up while the phrase 'midlife crisis' was still echoing in his head—he swore he could hear Brennan's voice saying those words even though they had actually been uttered in Spike's clipped Cockney accent—only added to Booth's agitation. He grunted and shrugged away the memory of the several arguments he'd had with Brennan about the Slayer.

"As for the last bit," Booth grumbled, "I'm not having a damn midlife crisis, alright?" He punctuated his brief rant with a roll of his eyes, then shrugged and, after glancing over his shoulder at his daughter, a smile again softened his face. "But I _will_ admit that taking the convertible's tonight is kinda my doing," he said. "Bones doesn't like letting me take it out by myself since it's technically _her _car. But, because this baby of mine is brilliant like her mom and clever like her dad, she doesn't fall asleep as fast when she's cranky at night with this touch of colic she's had if I put her in one of the other cars. I dunno how, but it's like...somehow she just knows the difference. Maybe it's the purr of the Mustang's engine or something since it's distinctive. I dunno, but I don't care since it means I can take the Mustang out since Bones doesn't want to get out of bed in the middle of the night if the baby's being fussy and—"

Holding up his hand, Spike closed his eyes and shook his head as he growled in a tone of voice that clearly indicated he'd reached his limits as he said, "Enough."

"Huh?" Booth asked, making a face, slightly taken aback by Spike's tone and simple statement. "What?"

"Listen, Angel...I'm gonna yack if you regale me with any more tales of your domestic bliss," Spike said. "So, please—don't be the normal wanker I know you usually get off on being and have a little mercy, huh? Just...stop."

Shaking his head, Booth moved towards the car seat and checked on his infant daughter. At the moment, she seemed to be anything but colicky or fussy as she blinked at her father, a smile lighting up her round, cherubic face when she saw him looking at her. Her light, almost luminous blue eyes were by far her most striking feature and were clearly inherited from her mother, although Brennan did frequently point out that the almond-like shape of the little one's occipital cavities were obviously more similar to Booth's than hers. But, the baby's creamy skin and the tufts of soft auburn hair left no doubt as to who had given birth to her. Sometimes, Booth struggled to see himself in the baby, except when she laughed. While Brennan argued that scientifically it was unlikely that laughs—or the smiles that accompanied them to her father's delight—could be inherited genetically, she did see some connection, sentimental perhaps, between their daughter's laughter and smile and his own.

Fussing over the green receiving blanket that was tucked around her body, Booth then turned back to Spike.

"You know how pitiful it is that you've been laid low by a ten-week old?" he said. "You've got, what? A hundred and fifty years on her, and you're getting the heebie jeebies because of a little baby?"

"Yeah," Spike nodded emphatically. "You bet your sorry arse that I am. And, I'm bloody smart to do it, too, since I know who her mum and da are." He stopped and then added with a wry grin and an almost sardonic tone of voice**,** "That is, I'm assuming the little Bluebell's dame here is the luscious bird with the hocus pocus doo-das that you've taken to shacking up with every now and again that's rattled Goldilocks as badly as she was when she found out that every now and then is actually just about all the time, right?"

Booth refrained from rolling his eyes at Spike's accurate if annoying description of Brennan, more than well aware by this point that his old rival was needling him just to get a rise out of him. He didn't want to give Spike the satisfaction of seeing him finally come unglued at what was rather a minor insult compared with the major ones he'd already slung that night.

"Yeah," he nodded, his voice measured and even. "But you already know she is." He was about to tell Spike to put a sock in it because he shouldn't be talking about Brennan that way—more for the vampire's sake if Brennan ever heard what Spike was saying about her than Booth's own well-being, but then he held back, silently reminding himself that he needed to immunize himself against Spike's agitations and had already wasted enough breath trying to warn the vampire. So, instead, he just grunted softly and shut his mouth.

Spike stared at him for a long moment, and when no verbal retort was forthcoming, he smirked. "Figured as much," the vampire replied with snort. "I was pretty sure that if you bounced her and traded her in for a newer model, you'd be lucky to be alive." He stopped and then made a face as he shook his head in what appeared to be sad resignation. "That's too bad, in a way, 'cause I know how Brennan's always been a bit of a night owl, and since she keeps nocturnal hours, I was thinking I might drop in and pay her a bit of a social call after we finish up here." Spike shrugged and let go of a dramatic sigh. "But I guess since you two are still shackin' up and playin' at keepin' house, guess I'll be going out clubbin' tonight after all."

A knowing smirk curved Spike's lips as he narrowed his gaze and stared off in the distance. A memory flickered briefly before his eyes as he recalled pulling Brennan's hip snug against his as the string quartet began to play first bars of the next song, glancing over at Angelus standing near the fireplace in the corner with a glass of whiskey dangling from his hand while the elder vampire watched with a scowl on his face. Spike had been delighted when he garnered the very reaction he'd sought. Angelus was visibly miffed to see his lover dancing with his rival, in no small part because even though proper Victorian manners precluded her from refusing William's request to dance, she'd seemed genuinely pleased to accept his invitation. They'd had quite the time, although Spike hadn't been certain what Brennan's reasons had been in tweaking Angelus' nose. That was the first instance where Spike had come to respect the auburn-haired witch, although it was far from the last. Looking back at Booth, Spike couldn't help but snicker.

"You know, I never really understood why the hell she thought you were the dog's bollocks anyway," Spike said, turning back to study the man standing before him, whose broad shoulders, confident swagger, strong jaw and penetrating brown eyes were familiar, even though the short hair with the buzzcut along the back and sides together with the blue button-down Oxford he wore over a gray T-shirt lent him a casual, easy-going if somewhat preppy look that Spike found odd. "You can't have been _that _good a shag," he said. "Though I wouldn't say the same for _her_," he said with a slight lick of his lips. "Yeah," he nodded. "I bet she's effin _electric _in the sack," Spike said. "Yeah, I know I'm right. She probably lights up your world like the freakin' Fourth of July, huh?" He waited with a smirk still on his lips as he waited for an answer. When one wasn't forthcoming, he laughed. "No need, man," he waved a hand in mock dismissal. "I know already. I mean, one look in her eyes, and I can just _tell_."

Booth's nostrils suddenly flared and his jaw tensed hard as he stood up and pushed away again from the car's fender and stood nose to nose with the fair-eyed vampire. "What the fuck are you talking about, Spike?" he spat, cocking his head to the side as a low growl rattled in his throat, his cheeks flushing and his ears reddening as he suddenly wondered if Spike had somehow seen something prowling around beneath the terrace of her Cheapside home one night while he was with her—perhaps a faint blue glow peeking out from between the thick drapes that hung over her bedroom window.

"Easy there, boyo," Spike grunted with a look of ridicule on his face as he pointed at Booth. "If I'd wanted to make a run at her, I'd have done that a long effin' time ago." A crooked grin twisted his mouth as he watched his now-human grandsire scowl and take a step backward as the infant behind him murmured in the car seat. "Besides," he added with a conspiratorial edge to his voice, "maybe I did, but since Elphie decided not to tell your sorry sack of a self, who am I to snog and tell?"

Giving the baby a sideways glance out of the corner of his eye as he watched with satisfaction as her father fumed, Spike pursed his lips together and flashed his eyebrows as a smile softened the look of his angular features. "Little tyke's gonna be a looker just like her mum, I bet," he said. "Though it's a good thing for the lucky little sprog here that she takes after her mum's looks and not your apish caveman features, huh?" Shoving his hands into his snug black jeans, he shrugged and said musingly, "I always wondered what it'd have been like, ya know. Fine lookin' bird like her, educated and smart, keeping everything in life all planned and fit and tidy. Because you and me both know that those are the ones who are always the most naughty and the most fun when it comes to sex, right?"

Spike made a throaty humming sound as he looked off into the distance, his eyes glazing over a bit as he bit back a smile. Booth followed his eyes and watched Spike's face, and felt the simmer in his blood begin to boil as he guessed his grandchilde's filthy gutter-borne mind was already fantasizing about Brennan's naked, sweaty form laying in bed..and not for the first, nor, he suspected, the last time.

With a blink, Spike grunted away his thoughts, then turned to Booth with a leer. "So come on, mate, just from one ex-vamp to a current one. Come on. You can tell me." He tried again to get Booth to spill the beans about Brennan, even though more than a century of such conspiratorial prompting had always failed. "I bet she's a tigress in the sack, huh?" he cracked, continuing to rub his grandsire raw a bit more even as he continued on, genuinely curious. "Wears your normal soddin' tosser like yourself out, doesn't she?" he asked. "I mean, you could barely keep up with her when you weren't such a poor shadow of your former undead self. Now that you've gone all respectable, gotten yourself a regular heartbeat, and become pro-oxygen, the poor thing probably really needs a good shag, seeing as how it's been awhile since she's been fucked long and hard—properly, ya know?"

"Yeah, what that woman needs to a good, long proper fuck by a being such as myself," Spike said with a smirk and a deliberately cocky nod. "And, I think I'm just the set of fangs that can help her out with that. Because we both remember there's nothing quite getting drained on one end and getting filled up on the other, right, Angel? I mean, it's not like I could turn Elphie, but maybe she'd let me have just a sweet little taste...from both ends, especially if she's as desperate as I think she is." He paused for a beat and then he tilted his head as he nodded. "I'm a touch surprised she hasn't wandered off to top herself up seeing as how you're not quite the specimen of all-night-shaggin' you used to be—just between you and me, Angel." Spike smiled with satisfaction at seeing Booth's ire rise, the agent's eyes narrowed as he stared back angrily and his hardened jaw ticked with tension, a response that merely caused Spike to push further. The lowered his tone of voice and gave Booth an encouraging jerk of his chin. "So, tell me, mate..." He paused dramatically and gave Booth a leer before he continued. "Is she as tight as she used to be? Or, is what the old fish wives say true and whelping this wee one finally loosened her up a bit, mmm?" Spike's inner smutdemon prodded him on as he added, "Come on. You can tell me, mmm?"

Booth's eyes widened as he found himself staring back at Spike, surprised that the cheeky bastard had big enough balls to talk about Brennan that way, _especially _knowing that if the witch found out the vampire had said such things about her, there would be some very serious hell to pay.

"Shut the fuck up, Spike," Booth snarled, his jaw shifting forward as he rolled his eyes and tried not to think about how long it had actually been since he and Brennan had last made love, even though the gurgling sounds he heard emanating from the car seat quickly reminded him.

It had been more than three months since he'd had sex with his wife. In the first days and weeks after he and Brennan took their cooing bundle home from the hospital, he hadn't had the time or energy to think about it, particularly after Brennan became sick with the flu less than two weeks after they'd brought the baby home. By the time he finally remembered his unsatisfied libido, Booth was too tired to do anything about it. However, as the weeks passed, and as their infant daughter settled into a schedule—and their altered life as parents of a newborn took a more definite shape—he had more time and energy that resulted in him not being able to do anything about his sexual frustrations since he didn't want to pressure Bren before she was ready.

However, that didn't mean he couldn't take out his frustration, sexual and otherwise, out on Spike. And, again, not for the last time, Booth cracked his knuckles as he contemplated how bad it would be if he started to pummel his grandchilde. Again, Brennan's look of displeasure flashed in his mind, and again, it was only for _her_ that he stayed his hand, although he doubted how much longer even the lingering spectre of Brennan's anger would be able to let him keep control of himself.

"Oooh," Spike snickered, holding his hands up in mock surrender. "Better watch out, 'cause Peaches is gettin' a little testy there," he snorted as he then nodded in what was a laughable attempt to calm and reassure Booth. "It's okay, love," he laughed. "Nothing lasts forever, right? Especially a stiffy when you're working with mere mortal meat, huh?"

"Spike," Booth warned him, his brow knit low and hard over his eyes. "Knock it the fuck off, alright? Just shut the hell up about Bren and sex because I don't want to hear it. You shouldn't be talking about her that way, anyway, like I've said a thousand times—and that's just tonight. But keep pushing me, and I'll be happy to tell you about what it's like watching Bren pump her breast milk so we could give it to the baby when we were first getting her used to feeding from a bottle instead of nursing the old-fashioned way."

He took a perverse sense of pleasure when he saw Spike cringe and that single look spurred him on to continue as he gave the vampire a mocking nod and a snicker. "Yep, that's right," he said with a toothy, crooked grin. "Picture it, Willy. Those tits you've been obsessing about for the better part of a hundred and twenty years? Well, they don't look quite so luscious when they're tucked into a little suction cup thing as the machine grinds away next to her and creates the necessary vacuum to suck the milk out of 'em."

If the vampire had color in his cheeks, Booth's description would have made him pale, but instead, he just grimaced.

"You know, Bren had to do that before her milk dried up." Booth lifted his brown eyes a little, then met Spike's wincing eyes briefly and had to bite back a smile before he continued. "A couple times a day. But she got sick and her body stopped making breast milk, so now the baby's on formula that we buy at the supermarket. Bren likes the organic, all-natural, earthy-crunchy kind that you can only get at Fresh Market in Rockville. But sometimes my little boo has to suffer with the Enfamil we get at Safeway since the Fresh Market is kinda out of the way if I'm coming up the freeway on the way home from Quantico or the Virginia State Police division headquarters in Fairfax, and we've run out of the fancy-schmancy organicky stuff and Bren doesn't have time to leave the lab to get it herself because when we're working a tough case catching douchebag evil-doers like yourself."

Spike made one more face that looked like he might start hacking before he arched an eyebrow at Booth's insult. But then something caused him to stop and pause, cocking his head to the side as he gave his grandsire a long, appraising, narrow-eyed look. Something in those familiar brown eyes seemed softer, warmer, more shimmery than the flickering points of dark umber he was used to seeing blink back at him after so many years. The sight surprised him. Taken aback slightly, Spike then shook his head after a long minute of silence lingered between the pair before he broke it with a chuckle and said, "Who would've thunk it, huh?"

"What?" Booth asked, a bit of his irritation fading as he realized that _this _time, Spike wasn't actually trying to deliberately agitate for the sole purpose of getting a rise out of him. His comment, Booth somehow knew, wasn't meant just to provoke. His curiosity piqued, Booth shook his head and asked, "What do you mean?"

Spike saw Booth's expression shift and smirked as the agent turned around to watch the baby wave her arms around, smacking her lips as she caught her father's eye and made a noisy bid for his attention.

"It just tickles me, Peaches, that's all," he nodded simply. Some of the mocking that always pervaded his tone when he spoke to his grandsire had faded away as he watched the little scene play out before him. "You finally get the Wizard to make you human, and I would've lost fifty quid if I'd have bet that the first thing you'd do when that happened would be to take off after Goldilocks as fast as your two poncy little feet could carry you. But, instead, you disappear for five years, and when Buffy does finally catch up with you, it's by pure accident—and to boot, she finds out that not only did you not want to be found, but you've exchanged bands of gold and then gone and knocked up the Wicked Witch of the West." Spike slapped his thigh and laughed, then wagged his finger at Booth with a twinkle in his eye. "That's just too good," he snickered. "I mean, bloody hell, I don't even think I could write something that good."

"Yeah?" Booth snapped, his defensive tone being a matter of reflex when it came to his grandchilde. After a moment, he thought better of it and softened his tone, then shrugged simply and said, "Well, surprise or not, it's what I want."

"Ya know," Spike began as he studied a smudge on the edge of his black leather duster. "I tried to tell the pet that, but she didn't want to listen."

He fell silent, lost for a moment in his own thoughts, then looked up and met Booth's gaze as the latter raised his brows sympathetically and shrugged. Reading the recognition and understanding in his grandsire's dark brown eyes, the vampire sighed and shrugged himself, then nodded and continued.

"But, then again," Spike said. "You know how she gets when she thinks she right about something." He nodded to emphasize his point before he shook his head at the thought of how the Slayer could get when she got it into her thick skull that she was right. "Like a dog with a bone in her teeth, that one," he sighed. "She just doesn't know when to let go. And she'll growl and snap at you if you try to take it from her." He paused before he looked back at Booth. "You know, she was so convinced she needed to ride in to save you from some Big Ol' Bad and Scary that she jumped on a flight out of the Big Apple as soon as she saw that bloody newspaper article about you and Elphie," he told Booth. "Between you and me, I've gotta admit that I was damn well surprised at how quickly she up and turned around and landed back on my doorstep."

Spike remembered the crestfallen expression of disbelief on Buffy's face when she walked back into the apartment, letting her overnight bag fall loudly and carelessly to the floor as she looked at him, her eyes hollow and her features slack, as if everything she thought was true had suddenly proved to be a lie. In a way, Spike mused, that's exactly what had happened, except he wondered if the larger lie was actually the one she'd been telling herself for so long.

"It was a bit of a shock when she got back and told me that I was right and that she shouldn't have come given how emphatic she'd been when she left," he explained. "I mean, when have you ever known Buffy to back down from anything and let it go just like that?" He snapped his fingers to illustrate his point.

After the memories of Booth's past had come back to him the past October—a space of time that was less than a year ago, but seemed many lifetimes distant in so very many other ways—and had inundated him on Halloween night with a wild, disorganized gush of thoughts, feelings, and recollections that stretched back more than two hundred and fifty years, he'd found himself struggling, in particular, with the images and remembrances of the women he'd shared himself with over the years. Of them, two stood out from all the others: Brennan, whom he had met a hundred years after he'd been turned—and who had since then been the sole constant in his life—and the young Slayer who he'd fallen in with, and in love with, in the years he'd spent in Sunnydale.

Booth sighed and shook his head. "No," he muttered, Spike's words ringing particularly true in light of the last conversation he'd had with Buffy. Booth looked up, nodded soberly and leveled a knowing stare at Spike. "You're right," he conceded. "She doesn't really do that thing. Letting go? That's just not Buffy's style..._especially _not when she thinks she's right."

The thought of Buffy's fiercely stubborn pursuit of what she thought was right brought him back to the stairwell of a Los Angeles police precinct in the middle of the night, where he'd stood with Buffy after another Slayer, Faith Lehane, confessed to committing homicide and had been taken into custody.

"_Do you have any idea what it was like for me to see you with her?" she asked him, breathless with anger as they stood in the hallway at the police station and argued about Angel's intervention in the destructive spiral that Faith had descended into. "That you went behind my back?"_

"_Buffy," he growled, his irritation at her lack of apparently understanding and empathy for the rogue Slayer darkening his voice. "This wasn't about you! This was about saving somebody's soul. That's what I do here, and you're __not__ a part of it." His brows knit low and hard over his eyes, a touch of bitterness of a different sort coming into his voice as he added,"That was your idea, remember? We stay away from each other."_

_Buffy's eyes flashed with a glimmer of regret which vanished almost as quickly as it had appeared, her eyes instead hardening with clear resentment and the obvious disdain she felt for him. "I came here because you were in danger," she said._

"_I'm in danger every day," Angel snapped, suddenly feeling a need to not let her get away one more time with rationalizing the situation so that she came out smelling like roses. "You came because of Faith." He paused for a brief moment that hung heavy between them. "You were looking for vengeance," he said grimly, his words ragged with anger._

_The Slayer met his accusation with a challenging glare of her own before she at last conceded his point. "I have a right to it," she said, her voice peaking as she shrugged indignantly._

_Angel's eyes blackened as he quickly replied in a low, stony tone, "Not in my city..." _

_She flashed him one more look of disbelief before she began to turn away. Suddenly, she stopped and looked at him, something softening in her expression even as her green eyes remained hard. "I have someone in my life now," she said quietly. Angel looked away, leaning back against the banister of the staircase behind him. After a moment, he brought his eyes back to meet hers, daring her to continue speaking. "That I love." Watching her, he swallowed, rolling his jaw to one side as he listened, biting his tongue as he felt the anger well up inside him again. "It's not what you and I had. It's very new." She took a step closer to him, then asked, her tone once more a bit vitriolic, "You know what makes it new?" She didn't pause to give him a chance to respond as she answered her own question. "I __trust__ him. I __know__ him."_

_Angel grunted out a dark laugh. "That's great," he sneered. "It's nice. You moved on. I can't. You found someone new. Well, good for you." He pushed himself off the banister and stood to his full height, looking down at her as he thought about the woman he really, truly loved—the woman whose soul was forever bound to his—and the excruciating ache he felt in his chest at the thought that what he'd had with __that__ woman was gone, squandered in a thicket of misunderstanding and jealousy that had all but torn the two apart the year before he came to Sunnydale. _

"_I see you again," he said, "and it cuts me up inside. And the person I share that with is __me__." Indeed, every time he saw the Slayer's face, or heard her name, it was a bitter reminder of not only what he no longer had with her, but even more so what he'd used her to replace...that void that had been filled by what he'd once had with Brennan, and how far away he seemed from ever having it again with the witch. His voice grew louder with every word, each syllable raw with anger—an anger that was so strong he felt it in his sinews, but yet which seemed too diffuse to even pin down. He was angry at Buffy for her arrogance and her presumptuousness, and yet also so very pissed at himself for his failure to fight harder to keep things from unraveling with Brennan as badly as they had in the year before he left New York for California. The anger rolled off of him in waves and burned dark in his eyes as he glared at the Slayer. "You don't know me anymore," he yelled at her. "So don't come down here with your great new life and expect me to do things your way. Go home."_

Booth's brows furrowed and a long sigh rattled in his throat at the memory of the moment when it all crystallized for him—the moment he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that what he and the Slayer had was over. He felt a murmur vibrate inside of him, the part of Brennan that was forever cleaved to him reminding him that there was always only one woman for him. He shook his head and shrugged.

"She's stubborn, that one," Spike observed, his pale eyes narrowing ever so slightly as he watched Booth's expression shift and soften again.

"Giving up and giving in isn't her thing," Booth observed soberly. "Never has been and probably never will be."

In a way, it was her spirited, at times stubborn persistence that first attracted him to the young Slayer. It gave her a maturity beyond her years and—though he wouldn't have admitted it at the time, and would never share with another living soul should his wife ever catch wind of it—reminded him of Brennan. Booth knew from the brief telephone conversation he'd had with Spike a few days earlier that, with the help of Willow and Giles, Buffy gathered an army of Potentials, young women with the capability to become Slayers from all over the world. She taken to caring for them and training them and, with Willow's help, had activated them into a formidable army of Slayers, the ranks of which swelled to nearly two thousand. While he always knew that Buffy was a natural leader, heading up a team of young demon-hunters in Sunnydale while she was still in high school, it was only after he left Sunnydale that the Slayer had really came into her own.

"_I wasn't sure you'd ever pick up," Booth said wryly when Spike finally answered the phone. "I know the way girls are with the phone and all, but damn. Does Buffy __ever__ let you answer your own friggin' phone?"_

_Spike was quiet for a moment, even as the surprise at hearing the familiar voice that he'd thought long gone faded, and he quickly recovered to provide what he thought was an appropriate response. "And 'ello to you, too, you wanker," he said, immediately recognizing his grandsire's deep voice. "Long time no chat, thank the bloody Lord. And, while I think it's a jolly good laugh to hear from you again, Grandpops, to answer your question, no. I don't like playing her Man Friday even if Buffy does think I'm pretty cute when I'm all helpful and the like."_

"_I'm not so sure you'd make a good Man Friday," Booth snorted. "Because you sure as fuck aren't cute. And 'helpful' would have to be about the last damn word I'd ever use to describe your useless, tagalong self. Unless hell's frozen over since I've been out of the loop on some things, and you __have__ turned over a new leaf, Spike, since I saw you last..." He waited for a beat, and then continued speaking, not really giving Spike a chance to respond. "Yeah," he continued. "Maybe Buffy does have you domesticated. I think I do remember ol' Robinson Crusoe convincing the savage Friday that it was bad to eat people for supper. Seems as though you've more or less given up that habit, too, huh? Or have you fallen off the wagon again?" _

"_Oh, whatever, Angel," Spike rolled his eyes as he spoke even though he knew that his reaction couldn't be seen through the telephone. When he'd finished, he grasped the cordless black handset to his ear and said, "Now what do you want? Because you have no damn idea how lucky it is for you that she's out right now, 'cause if she knew I was talking to you, it'd be effin' Dr. Jekyll and Mr. effin' Hyde."_

"_Jekyll and what?" Booth grunted into his BlackBerry, his eyes narrowed and his brow furrowed deeply as he shook his head in confusion. "What the hell are you talking about? The __last__ thing I want is to talk to her."_

_Booth could've sworn he could hear the vampire roll his eyes through the phone. "I guessed that as much, genius, since you said you've been the one that's been ringin' the phone off the bloody hook and even I know you're not such a sorry poser that you've taken to gettin' your jollies off by crank callin'. What I meant was, if the pet knew I was talkin' to you, it wouldn't do at all because she's only now gettin' back to her ol' settled, head-screwed-on-straight self," Spike clarified vaguely. "No thanks to you," he sputtered into the phone, a bit of bitterness bleeding into his voice as he spoke._

"_I don't know what you're talking about," Booth grumbled into the handset, a defensive edge to his voice._

"_You__ wouldn't know it," Spike told him simply. "But she's mellowed a lot over the years. Her goin' down there to drop in on your sorry arse was like a blast from the past—a real shit-swirl in a time machine. All of a sudden she's all back to her manic-depressive high school self, 'cept no amount of friggin' lithium would set her straight again. So __I've__ been the lucky one who's had to deal with herself while Goldilocks had to detox and get you outta her system again."_

_Spike's unexpected rant was met with a staticky silence. _

"I guess her stubbornness is the one thing I can't rightly blame on you," Spike mused.

"No, no," Booth repeated, muttering the syllables indistinctly as he remembered how the Slayer had tried to pull herself together after their angry exchange on the National Mall. "She doesn't really let things go unless she has no other option...and sometimes, not even then..." He sighed as he thought of how they'd parted ways in front of the coffee cart, a painful if somewhat fractured tension hanging in the air between them, and how her farewell was more of an _au revoir _that seemed to leave open the possibility that they would, indeed, cross paths again since, as Buffy had told him in parting, it was rather a small world.

It was the thought of crossing paths with the Slayer again that compelled Booth to make that phone call to Spike. He remembered how strange it had felt listening to Spike talk about all that had happened to the Slayer—and to the vampire himself, as the two of them grew closer once again—but not in a jealous way, but rather in that it seemed that, the more he heard about Buffy's recent goings-on, the more it seemed that the person she'd evolved into was dramatically different than who she'd been before.

_Or maybe it's me who's changed, _he thought. _Or maybe both. _He sighed quietly and shook his head. _I guess it doesn't really matter anymore. She was never my destiny, my fate, no matter what I tried to tell myself otherwise. It was always only Bren. And the rest? The rest of it was just a very big, if necessary, mistake. I mean, yeah, sure, getting involved with her made a bigger mess of my fucking life than it already was, and I didn't do her any favors either, I guess. I probably held her back more than anything else. And, maybe, in some ways, she kept me from doing what I was supposed to be doing and being the person I was supposed to be. The years I spent fucking around in Sunnydale, and afterwards when I'd tossed in my lot in L.A. with my rag tag band of Merry Men that read like a list of Who's Who in Sunnydale, 1999 edition...well, worst case scenario, it just about helped me finish of any chance of a future that I had with Bren. And best case? It sure did keep us from figuring out things and getting our shit straight sooner then we did. But, hey, it's like the Good Book says, huh? "To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under Heaven." So I guess things worked out like they were supposed to...the stuff me and Bren went through, __all__ of it, including all the crap that had to do with Buffy, it made us stronger, right? We had to almost lose it all to realize we had to grab ahold of it and, this time, never ever let it go. And Buffy was part of that. She's part of my past, _he told himself. _She's a part of what's made me the man I am today. Without her, I wouldn't be who I am, or have what I have. Even if she's a part of my past I'd rather forget...and one of these days, I'm gonna have to accept that. Because if there's one thing a guy like me knows, you can't outrun your past. It __always__ finds you. I just hope to God it's not another round of Buffy finding me with Bren because I'm not sure what either one of them would do in a Celebrity Death re-match like that. All I do know is things would __not__ end well for me, so please, God...just keep Buffy away from D.C._

In the end, though, it didn't matter, because he found himself reminded of his past by a case he'd worked—or, rather, a case he hadn't worked.

A couple of weeks before Brennan's due date, Booth threw out his back moving furniture around the loft to free up space in the room that was to be the baby's nursery, and it galled him to watch his very pregnant wife work a case with Special Agent Peyton Perotta while he had to take four days off of work to lay around the loft, resting his back, the injury itself yet another reminder of how much weaker and more vulnerable he was than he'd been before he regained his humanity. Yet it wasn't the injury and the ensuing reminder of his humanity that made him think about the dangers of his past. It was the murder weapon in the case Brennan worked with Perotta—a broadsword—that reminded him of the many times he'd wielded such a weapon over the years he battled demons and other supernatural threats back in California. The sight of the long-bladed, two-handed weapon triggered a rush of memories and, worse, of worry as he thought about his pregnant partner and the child who grew inside of her.

The broadsword and his sore back had sent him into a three-day funk of dark, inconsolable brooding, but as Brennan's due date approached, he'd tried to focus on her and getting ready for the baby's arrival, pushing his worries to the back of his mind. One night, eight weeks after Kathryn's birth, Booth woke up to change her diaper and feed her a bottle. The moment he'd laid her back in her crib, she'd squeezed her tiny eyes shut and began to howl, her crying piercing the quiet of the loft apartment. So he'd taken her back into the living room and just held her, rocking her back and forth in one arm as he flipped through the cable lineup with his free hand. As his daughter's crying seemed on the verge of fading and with the hope that she would soon settle down, Booth let go of the remote and began to stroke her soft hair with his thumb as he held her close in the other arm. The channel he'd last flipped to was an independent movie station, which was broadcasting a mid-80s B-movie called _Night of the Demons. _At first, he didn't even realize what was on the screen, so focused was his attention on his infant daughter. But as her cries quieted into soft murmur, he looked up and watched as two teenagers ran from a fanged, snarling demon. The blood drained from Booth's face as he watched the screen, transfixed and horrified by what he saw.

In an inspired gumshoe moment, he'd taken the one piece of information he'd had—that Buffy was living with Spike in New York—and ran her name through the New York DMV index, then took the Manhattan address on her driver's license, then went into another database and did a reverse search for a landline telephone number associated with that address. He'd only had to ring the phone three times from a blocked number before a male rather than female voice eventually picked up. When he _finally _got ahold of his grandchilde, he first got Spike to promise not to mention to Buffy that it was Booth who'd called. And second, after a promise of a first-class ticket from JFK to Reagan National—Booth winced a bit as he remembered he was _still _going to have to explain that one to Bren at some point before the Mastercard bill came in—and a night in a decent hotel, he received a text message confirming that Spike had finally arrived in D.C.

Eventually, it was a shrug of Spike's shoulders and a flash of his darkened eyebrows (that were in strange contrast to his straw blond hair) that drew Booth's attention back to what the vampire was saying.

"You know," Spike said, "She was pretty rattled when she came back from D.C." He lifted his blue gaze up to meet Booth's questioning look. "Last summer?" he offered. When Booth still maintained a neutral gaze, Spike rolled his eyes even as he said, "After meeting Elphie in the park, you know?"

Booth finally nodded but said nothing, remembering how furious Brennan had been when she'd charged into the loft after her run-in with Buffy on the National Mall. _She was fucking loaded for bear, _he recalled soberly. _I knew from the second she walked in that whatever it was, it wasn't gonna be good. _He stopped and then swallowed the cocky grin that threatened to crack his stoic face to Spike when he recalled how that particular discussion had ended between them. _Okay, so it wasn't __all__ bad, but I'm getting too old to keep using sex to talk her down after her getting worked up like that. God help us if she ever runs into Buffy again. 'Cause some serious shit's gonna go down, and it ain't gonna be pretty. _With a shrug and a jerk of his chin, Booth turned his attention back to Spike and prompted him to continue when the FBI agent saw the vampire had fallen silent waiting for him.

Satisfied by whatever he saw in Booth's gesture, Spike continued. "I know you wouldn't know this, but she came back from Europe different, mate," he explained. "After the Slayers got activated? She finally felt like she'd found her purpose in life, and it was great. She was...mellower, you know." He struggled to find the right words to describe the change he'd noticed in the Slayer after he'd eventually re-made her acquaintance after L.A. had returned to Earth from Hell. "More...squared away-like. More confident and less—well, the way she used to be, all piss and vinegar, apt to go off half-cocked when she got a bloody bee in her bonnet about somethin', although to be honest, I always sorta liked that about her. She had spunk and bollocks—a lot more fuckin' bollocks than you knew what to do with, apparently." He paused for a beat and looked off, a lazy smile coming onto his face as he recalled some unspoken memory before he nodded to himself, pleased at the recollection. "Always kept me on my toes, that one," he said before going back to his original point. "And so, anyway, as time went on, she's gotten a lot easier to deal with...maybe a bit more laid back, but not nearly so aggravatin' as she used to get after she'd spend any amount of time around a barmpot like you." He stopped and flashed his grandsire a toothy smile. "Not like didn't know that before since the pet de-toxed back to a normal person after you high-tailed it out of Hellmouth Central. Like I always said, it's just that she needed an extended Angel-vacation, huh?" He flicked his thumb confidently in Booth's direction as he chuckled. "Yeah," he said. "The longer she stayed away from you, the better, it seemed." Spike then, in an uncharacteristically enlightened way, looked from her father to the baby and back to Booth again before he added, "Maybe it was better for the both of you, ehh?"

Booth stared at Spike, already annoyed that his grandchilde had almost waxed poetic about the Slayer that it took him a moment to realize he had no reason not to concede Spike's point.

"Huh," he grunted dismissively, grinding his jaw from one side to the other. "Maybe, but that's only because I decided it was time to grow up and get on with my life, Spike. So I guess I'll have to take your word for it that she'd decided to finally get her head screwed on straight." He paused for a minute and then shook his head as he muttered, "I guess it had to happen sometime, but she's always been the one to say she's a late bloomer and all. As for me, I just sorta figured she kinda went on some extended post-college Spring Break streak since the Hellmouth was closed, partying her ass off in Italy with her new fuck-buddy, The Immortal. I'm still guessing she was probably too busy getting tanked and stuffed to do any actual slaying and only now wants to make up for lost time."

"Hey!" Spike grunted at Booth, a look of indignation coming over his face as his brows knit low over as they were over his scowling eyes. "Now come on, Angel, that's not fair."

Booth rolled his eyes as Spike glared at him. "Seriously?" he snorted. "You don't remember our lovely little Roman holiday when we showed up ready to save Buffy from The Immortal only to find she was getting her brains screwed out of her by the same fucker who had us strung up like sides of beef the last time we were in Italy together while he was off having a threesome with Darla and Dru?" Booth gestured with his head. "What was that? Extra credit during her semester abroad? Come on, Spike. You can't tell me you don't remember that..."

Finally, Spike conceded the point with a shrug. "Okay, she's not gonna win any prizes for that grotty little detour," he said. "But, the important thing here is that eventually, she _did_ come to her senses." He paused, made a face as he thought back on what he'd just said, and then nodded to himself as he looked up at Booth. "Besides," he added. "In a way, she's done more to 'help the helpless,' using your wee little slogan, boyo, than _you _have these last few years. She's been out there fighting the good fight against the powers of darkness and their endless legions of nasty, slobberin' foot soldiers, and you're—what?" He pointed back down in the general direction of Booth's holstered gun. "Spending your days doin' what? Pluckin' mere mortal crooks off the streets in onesies and twosies?" He snorted in clear derision at the mere possibility. "You're a complete fuckin' wally if you think that's doin' any good, Angel. I mean, you might as well be sittin' in your bathtub wanking off if you think that's really making the universe any safer for the non-evil types—at least, compared to what Goldilocks is doing."

Booth's arms and shoulders tensed, and for a moment he considered getting into Spike's face to defend himself, but he heard the quiet whisper of the voice of reason somewhere in the back of his mind, and so thought better of it. "I'm not even gonna dignify that with a response," he said, trying to channel his best Brennan in that moment even as he considered what Spike had said. After a beat, his face softened as he grunted, "So? You're telling me she's really changed?"

"Yeah," Spike said. "That's what I been tryin' to tell your tit-head self, but it seems to be takin' an effin' fortnight to penetrate that thick skull of yours."

Booth glanced over at the baby, arching an eyebrow as he noted with surprise that the infant was still sitting there, quietly waggling her arms and blowing raspberries with her tiny drool-moistened lips as they men talked. Shaking his head, he turned back to face the vampire.

"So, what?" he said, a bit of disgust that he'd always felt at the idea of Buffy shacking up with Spike creeping into his voice as he sighed. "You two are a '_thing' _again?"

A faint smile danced across the vampire's lips as he detected a hint of something in Booth's tone—not jealousy, exactly, but _something _that made him take great delight as he rolled his shoulders and answered Booth's questions. "Well, since me an' Dru finally ended up in shambles—I mean, fuck me, what a fine cock-up _that_ was—anyway, well, I figure if I can't have Dru, then Buffy's not too bad a consolation prize, huh?"

As Spike spoke, Booth's brow furrowed as some of Buffy's words from their last conversation echoed in his mind.

"_What's the story, Angel? Was I some kind of consolation prize?"_

Turning his hard gaze to meet Spike's, he couldn't help but wonder if the wording had been deliberate. "What the fuck are you talkin' about, Spike?" he snapped, a sharply defensive edge in his voice. He looked into Spike's eyes again as he waited for an explanation, but didn't see the glimmer of sarcasm or smirk he would've expected had the choice of words been a deliberate attempt to bait him. Instead, Spike, clearly surprised by Booth's response, remained unusually quiet. For his part, Booth finally let go of the breath he was holding, relaxing a little as he slowly shook his head. "You know what? Nevermind," he said. "But since you never say I'm nice to you, I'm gonna do you a favor and let you in on something that even a blockhead like you _should _know. Buffy'd put your balls on skewers if she heard you say that."

Rolling his eyes, Spike shook his head. "Oh piss off, Angel," Spike huffed. "You know it was just a crack. For fuck's sake, you bloody ponce. Lighten up a little." He rolled his eyes and sighed, then shook his head before bringing his eyes back up to meet Booth's. "But yeah, me and the pet are spendin' some quality time gettin' to know each other now and then if you really gotta know."

The admission hung in the air between them for the better part of a minute before Spike flashed his brows and broke the silence again.

"That's why, when she said last month how she wanted to come back down here and see you, I actually agreed it was a good idea," Spike told him. The vampire surveyed Booth's face and crossed his arms in front of him, then shrugged a little as if in response to some kind of internal dialogue that was running inside of his own mind. "I figured she just needed to get this daft idea out of her skull that either (a) you needed her, or (b) you wanted her. I'm not really sure why her little dust-up with Elphie didn't settle those in her mind, but be that as it may..."

"You'd'a thought..." Booth agreed instantly, cutting Spike off.

The two men looked at each other, exchanging a knowing glance as they considered the different versions each had heard of the encounter and the one thing both had had in common—despite not yet having a chance to compare the Slayer's rendition with Brennan's—was that it hadn't ended well for _either _party. After a moment of genial silence, Spike nodded at Booth.

"Right," the vampire retorted. "So, that being said, you want to tell me the real reason why now not three months after Buffy made her second foray into the District, your sorry sad sack self is asking me to come do the same?"

"I needed to talk to you because..." Booth hesitated, almost every fiber of his being screaming against what he'd known from the moment he'd picked up the phone and heard Spike's voice that he'd have to finally admit.

Having spent so long soldiering on his own, and having been betrayed as many times as he had by those close to him, Booth loathed asking others for anything, and the idea of asking _Spike _for help made him genuinely nauseous. The last time he'd had to ask Spike for anything had been a few months after he'd taken over the L.A. office of Wolfram & Hart, when he'd asked Spike to go to Rome to fetch the dead body of a demon client so it could be returned to his family. Spike told him to bugger off and refused to go, although not two hours later, when the two were en route to Rome on W&H's private jet to keep the Immortal away from Buffy, Angel had asked Spike to set aside their differences and worked together for the good of the mission—and Buffy, who Angel still cared for in a certain way because he felt a certain responsibility for the path she'd ended up on, even if he'd known their paths would take them in disparate directions. Setting aside the fact that Booth hated being indebted to _anybody, _least of all Spike, he knew he didn't have any choice as circumstances yet again required him to swallow his pride and ask Spike for a favor.

Taking a deep breath, he finally said in a grim tone of voice, "I need your help."

"What?" Spike snorted. "_You_ want _my_ help?"

His eyes narrowed and he stared at Booth, searching for some hint that somewhere behind the suddenly dour expression on his grandsire's face he'd find a bit of the cocky, playful snark that had been Angelus' calling card for the nearly two decades that the two had rampaged together and battled for dominance until the night in 1898 when a bit of Gypsy magic sent Angelus reeling under the weight of conscience and empathy that accompanied his ensoulment. Even with a soul, the old vampire had a certain edgy snark about him that, if anything, became even sharper and edgier with his sullen, broody nature. _He's got to be joking,_ Spike thought. _The effin' John Thomas is just windin' me up and doing a fine and dandy good job of it, too. _

"You sure you didn't get a wacky batch of blueberries in your scone this morning?" he asked Booth. "Or did you hit your thick noggin' a bit too hard even for you when you slipped on the side of the tub while you were in the shower wankin' off this morning?" The vampire snickered and began to laugh, wiping the tears from his pale blue eyes with the back of his hand. "I mean, seriously, Peaches. Come on. _You _askin' _me _for help is right up there with pigs flying and Derby County's bollocks football club actually having a winnin' season. So, I know I _must've _heard you wrong. Come again?"

Booth's heavy brow sloped low and hard over his dark, brooding eyes as he glared at his grandchilde. "You heard what I said, Spike," he spat, his teeth gritted as he tried to ignore the bile he felt rising in the back of his throat. "I need your help."

"You've gotta be fuckin' kidding me, mate," Spike coughed, squeezing his eyes shut and shook his head, snorting as he struggled to contain a laugh. He cocked his head to the side and raised a sharply arched eyebrow as he scanned Booth's eyes again for some sign that the whole thing was an elaborate practical joke. After a moment, his laughter faded as he saw the dark, almost morose expression cast on Booth's face, and the vampire's crooked grin collapsed into little more than a faint, half-hearted smirk. "I mean that's bloody rich," he muttered. He blinked a few times and raised his eyebrows before he finally put up his hands in mock surrender. "I must be dreaming, mate. You askin' for my help? Some serious bollocks must be goin' down for you to a dial back that super-sized ego of yours enough to ring me up and have me nip down here—all expenses paid, first-class ticket and all—to do you a bleedin' favor." Spike paused for a beat and shook his head, his hands on his hips as he looked down on the ground before he leveled his gaze back at the FBI agent. "For fuck's sake, Angel," he sighed. "I don't believe it, but maybe domesticity did for you what gettin' the bloody stuffing knocked out of you night after night never could. I mean, really, I don't know what else could've taught you humility, but I guess _something _did if you've finally come 'round to admittin' that you need help and want a hand sorting out the local demon population?"

"Huh?" Booth coughed, quirking an eyebrow, as he quickly shook his head. "What the hell are you talking about, Spike? Local demon population?" With a second and more emphatic shake of his head, he raised his leg and rested his foot on the Mustang's bumper, leaned into his thigh and added with a grumble, "No. Why would you even ask that?"

The vampire laughed as he shrugged his shoulders a bit. "Well, to be honest, I figured I'd be tellin' you this as soon as I showed up since I guessed you'd be busting my balls from here to Sunday 'cause I rolled in late for our little rendezvous," he said. "But I got sidetracked on the way over here because of a balls up with a seriously manky nest of Shi-De-Emo demons hanging out in the tunnels between the Farragut West and McPherson Square stops on the Metro. Managed to dispatch two of the slimy fuckers before I had to catch my train over here to meet your poxy ass." Spike looked Booth up and down with a crooked grin, then said, "I s'pose it's a good thing that we met out here as opposed to over by my hotel since for all your bottle and swagger, I don't think you have a bleedin' chance to hold your own with those kind o' buggers." Pointing at Booth's waist, Spike added, "You _do _seem to have gone a little soft around the middle since last I saw you." He narrowed his eyes as he made it clear he was studying Booth's physique before he rolled his shoulders lightly. "You might want to think about getting a personal trainer, mate. I mean, I know you were already well on your way to adding to that bulking-up phase you started when you went all respectable at Wolfram & Hart, but even still..you _really _should take better care of yourself, beefcake." He smirked for a beat, then added, "And maybe they can recommend a good barber, mate. I mean, sure, this..." He jerked his head and brought his eyes to settle on Booth's close-cropped hair. "It's an improvement on the sorry mop you were always sportin' and proppin' up with way more than your ration card's worth of nancy-boy hair gel. But if you ask a sporty gent like myself, now the old pendulum's swung way too damn far in the other direction, and you're wearing the same 'do as every other government wanker in this town."

"Wait a sec, Spike," Booth interjected. "Right. Like I'm gonna take hair-styling advice from a guy who's still rocking the Billy Idol look—what, twenty-five years after _Rebel Yell _came out?" He made a _pfft _sound with his lips before he smirked. "Gimme a damn break," he snickered. "Until you get some balls to update your latest get-up, 'cause even toning it down to maybe a Rob Halford look would be a significant improvement, I don't want to hear shit from you about how I look, okay?" He paused, crossing his arms, as he nodded at Spike. "You know, now that I think about it, I think that might be a pretty good idea, especially since you still rock the long leather duster, which is definitely consistent with Rob Halford's look lately. Because we both know that Billy Idol was more the tight, sleeveless T-shirt and studded wristband look, and you gave that up _years _ago."

Spike's cool blue eyes narrowed sharply and the corner of his lip curled as he felt a flash of anger. He shot his grandsire a withering glare as the remark echoed in his head, the edge to Booth's voice reminding the vampire of a hundred different times he found himself on the receiving end of a humiliating rant spoken in a sneering brogue. He felt the flare of resentment and raised his chin, chastising himself for letting his grandsire get the better of him, even if only for a moment. He shrugged away his annoyance with a disdainful snort.

"You gotta be kiddin' me mate," Spike said. He was about to return Booth's serve on the subject of hair and fashion when something shiny caught his eye. Spike looked over at the leg that Booth had propped up on the car's bumper, noting that his jeans had ridden up enough to reveal a hammerless .357 snubnose revolver tucked into an ankle holster. "Hey, uhh, mate," he said, pointing at the pistol. "You do know those things don't do much against most of the critters that go bump in the night, right? I mean, I know you're all Hill Street Blues nowadays, and those peashooters work great for the two-bit derelicts you're used to dealing with these days, but you might as well be throwing spitwads at most of the underworld nasties if you're gonna use one of those." Spike paused for a minute and then snickered as he added, "I mean, it's sayin' something when ol' nancy boy Wesley himself was more intimidating with his freakish Rogue Demon Hunter weapons and those poufy spell books than you are walking around with one of those in your dirty sock there."

Booth's eyes swiveled over to the squirming bundle in the car seat, looking over at the baby to make sure she was okay, and then back to the pale-eyed vampire. "What's your point, Spike?" he asked, gritting his teeth and sucking in his gut as he glanced down at his waist and bit out the question.

"I'm just sayin'," Spike said with a narrow-eyed leer, "If I weren't as smart a bloke as I actually am—" He paused for a beat to see if Booth would interrupt him, shooting him a look that made it clear what the dare was, but when Booth just rolled his eyes at the vampire's weakest attempt yet to bait him, Spike merely continued. "I might've thought when you rang me up and invited me down here it wasn't just for ol' times' sake," he nodded solemnly. He crossed his arms as he stared back at the FBI agent. "So why don't we just skip whatever bollocks pretext you've come up with to drag me outta New York and skip straight to the point where you just come right out and say ya need someone to help mop up the demonic scuzz here in D.C. because your nancy boy self isn't up to the task of taking care o' things the way you used to before you cashed in your Shanshu card, hmmm?"

Booth put his hands on his hips and stood up to his full height, striding up to Spike until the two were standing nose to nose. Tilting his head to the side as his eyes narrowed to fierce, dark slits, he glared at his old companion and rival as a low growl rattled in the back of his throat.

"What are you saying, Spike?" he barked, his brow deeply furrowed in confusion as the conversation seemed to have taken a detour away from the direction Booth had intended when he'd originally asked the vampire to come down to D.C. in the first place.

It was enough that his old rival had honed in on some of Booth's more sensitive vulnerabilities as quickly as he had, and, as the vampire was want to do as soon as he realized he'd found a tender spot, poked and picked at it just to get irritate Booth. That alone would have been enough to annoy the piss out of the agent and make him snippy, but it wasn't Spike himself that made the vampire's barbs cut Booth as deeply as they did. It was the cooing, gurgling little girl in the car seat a few feet away whose good-natured if somewhat impatient murmuring that made what would otherwise be irritating teasing sting Booth deeply. Turning his head to glance over at his infant daughter and saw her arms waggle in the air, he felt Spike's words gnaw at him and his jaw suddenly hardened in indignation.

"Are you saying I can't protect my family?" he snarled.

Throwing his hands up in mock surrender, Spike shook his head and took a step back. "Aww, now hey—keep yer pantalets on, eh? I didn't say bloody word one about your family." His eyes swiveled over to the cooing child in the car seat who reached up and grabbed at a little purple terrycloth fish that dangled from the handle of the car seat. "I mean, not like that anyway, mate. So don't get your knickers all in a twist, okay?"

He grunted and took a long, appraising look at the man he knew for a 120-odd years as the vampire Angelus. Physically, he looked more or less the same—perhaps a touch fleshier around the middle than he'd been when last Spike saw him, recuperating from a three-story fall onto the pavement after being lured into a demonic ambush—except that he was dressed more casually than Spike had seen him before. The dark, brooding eyes and the loping, catlike swagger with which he moved—all this was the same as it had always been, though, and Spike took some comfort in that consistency. Still, he felt a need to point out the obvious when he next spoke.

"You're really gone native in this new life of yours, huh?" Spike asked as he watched Booth's dark eyes swivel again to glance over at his child, a father's proud smile spreading across his face as the infant made gurgling sounds and punched at the dangling purple fish with her tiny little fists. Booth reached over and tucked the green blanket in again after the little girl's squirming loosened it on one side. "Done turned into the doting, protective husband and gurling, idiotically happy father to your missus and the wee runtling there."

Booth scowled at him, but then, seeing no anger or ulterior motive in the vampire's pale blue eyes, took a step back and leaned against the fender of the blue Mustang. The murmuring of the baby sitting in the car seat behind him seemed to punctuate Spike's comment with an undeniable reality that made Booth's belly swirl with an inarticulable anxiety. He stood there, his tight jaw shifting from one side to the other as he sullenly swallowed his pride, before he finally said anything in response.

"Believe it or not," he said with a weary sigh. "And I know you probably won't, but it wasn't as much whatever demons you tangled with on your way over here, but..." He swallowed, then took a deep breath before continuing, his voice low and somewhat grim as he spoke. "Well, the actual reason I wanted you to come here to D.C. and see me in person was because of Bren and the baby." He shrugged, then smiled weakly. "They're actually kinda why I asked you here."

Spike considered the explanation, staring at Booth for a long moment before he finally spoke. "Why me?" Spike inquired, at last asking the question that again, Booth had anticipated the vampire asking him almost immediately, and the second-most burning question Spike had had about the entire situation since he'd first heard his grandsire's voice on Buffy's landline phone in New York. "Why not one of your other besties like Gunn or Faith?"

"Because," Booth said, reaching up and running his hand through his hair with a heavy sigh. "You're the one person who actually likes it when I'm nowhere near Buffy. Everything was nice and mellow for us here before Buffy came and upset the applecart. The last damn thing I need is to have Buffy, Dru, Connor or anybody else from that side of the universe coming in here unannounced to screw up the good thing I've got going with me and Bren and the baby. They're my family, and—"

Spike, in an uncharacteristically serious tone of voice, cut him off as he said, "And the junior bint isn't?"

Booth arched his head back and closed his eyes, letting go of a long sigh and swallowing hard before bringing his gaze back to meet Spike's. "Look," he said, his voice even if faintly edged with a certain wistfulness. "What I did, back then, with Connor, I did because he was better off without me, alright? I wanted him to have a chance at having as normal a life as possible and..." He closed his eyes and shook his head, rolling his lips together as he thought about the son of his supernatural life, the son whose very conception defied the well-understood laws of life and death. He felt a sharp ache in his chest as he remembered cradling his son in his arms after bringing him in from the rain on the night he was born. "I did what I could for him, Spike, and it killed me to do what I did, but it was better for him. That was the one smart thing I ever could or did actually do for him, and what I did, I did out of love for him, so that he would have the future he deserved." He brought his hand up and rubbed his tired eyes, then glanced over at his daughter, still quietly and contentedly playing with her purple fish toy. "A day doesn't go by that I don't wonder if what I did was the only thing I could've done for him, you know—but, in the end, I know I did right by him. And I hope he would think I did. Or, at least understand why I did what I did..."

As Booth's voice trailed off, and Spike found himself momentarily at a loss for words, sober silence fell between them and the quiet was filled with the soft sounds of the infant murmuring nearby. Turning to smile at his daughter as he watched her little hands bat at the purple fish, Booth nodded and then began to speak again.

"Unlike back then?" He gestured at the baby carrier. "Here? Now? Everybody's better off _with _me here," he said, "and them...well, wherever the fuck they are, it's better for both them and for me as long as they're not here." He paused and then sighed. "I mean, setting aside the fact that the exact type of people I _don't_ want sniffing around the District are gonna pay close attention when a Slayer like Buffy keeps visiting the same place, with her coming down here, not once but twice in less than three months..." His voice trailed off as he became a bit exhausted by the mere memory of how badly Buffy's presence had upset Brennan. "Well, let's just say that's besides the fact that she managed to send Bren into outer freakin' orbit that took me a hell of a lot of time, energy, and effort to get her back down from. And on top of that, it just brought all kinds of stuff up that was best left alone, you know? The craziness of what my life was like in L.A. just a little bit too close to home for my tastes, okay? It was a blast from the past and trip down memory lane I could've really done without. Ergo, me staying here...and away from Buffy, and the entire world she represents..." He again paused for dramatic emphasis as he leveled a critical look at his old rival. "You know I'm not lying when I say it's in both our best interests."

Spike pursed his lips, considered Booth's explanation, and then slowly nodded when he was satisfied with Booth's reasoning. "You're still a tosser, " the blonde vampire said with a smirk before his face turned serious. "But, as much as I hate to bloody admit this, when you've got a point, you've got a point."

"Thank God," Booth sighed, the tension in his shoulders seemingly melting away as relief washed over him.

Still, something gnawed at the vampire, and he couldn't let the point go unanswered as he spoke. "But why me?" Spike blurted out. "I mean, why me and not Gunn, or even Faith? 'Cause I gotta admit, we've not exactly been bosom buddies over the years, mate. Even when we were on the same side, we drove each other bonkers—absolutely off our trollies, you know." The vampire arched an eyebrow and reached up, scratching the back of his head as he surveyed his old rival from head to toe. There was an odd dissonance to it all: so much was the same, or at least vaguely familiar, but yet also different at the same time. "I'm not against helpin'," he said. "It's just...well, I don't understand why you asked me and not someone else, especially as I don't much like the idea of being any feeb's stool pigeon."

Booth shifted his weight from one foot to the other and crossed his arms, then looked away for a few moments as he chewed on the inside of his lip. "We go back a long way," he said, bringing his gaze back to meet Spike's. "Ties that bind, and all that shit, okay, Spike? I've known you for more than a hundred years. And in a way, you know...we're family. I mean...obviously, we haven't always got along—"

Spike cocked his head and arched an amused brow. "Well, mate," he said with a sarcastic grin. "If that ain't the very definition of family, I don't know what is..."

"But...well," Booth conceded. "I know you better than all the others...even the ones that were my friends. And out of everyone in that old world, seeing as how I know that you want to make a go of it with Buffy, and you know your best shot at that is to keep her away from me, I think..." He took a deep breath and shrugged. "That gives you more reason than anybody, I think, to help me out—and to do this thing."

Spike considered his point and then nodded. "Fine, yeah," he said. "Right again, Peaches." He paused, jutted his chin in Booth's direction and then sighed. "Best not make a habit of that bein' right thing, there. I don't think I could get used to it."

"Well," Booth snickered. "Seeing as how I definitely wouldn't want to put your nose all outta joint, ya know, I can shut up on this...'specially seeing as how that ugly-ass mug of yours needs all the help it can get in the aesthetics department, huh?"

"Yeah, yeah, whatever," Spike guffawed with a dismissive wave of his hand. He then quirked a dark blond eyebrow at Booth as another thought suddenly occurred to him. "So, Angel," he began. "That answers the why-me-and-not-them part of tonight's Twenty Questions. But it still doesn't tell me why we couldn't just do this all over the phone, yeah?" He studied his grandsire for a minute and the pointed his index finger at him. "Why go through all the trouble to have me come down here? Why do this in person?"

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**-tbc-**

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**A/N2: **_Well, we had to split it somewhere. As should not be surprising to anyone who is familiar with Dharmasera's wordiness, this chapter actually ballooned to double its original size. However, we wanted to give everyone something to chew on while we finish the final edits on part 2 (which is already written and mostly edited, but is receiving some important final touches). We should have the next part ready to post in the next week or thereabouts (although that posting projection shouldn't be anticipated as any legally binding point to which we can be firmly held.) Coming up next, the rest of Spike's conversation with Booth...and that teeny tiny exchange that some of you have been clamouring for...you know the one? Booth vs. Buffy? Well, it *might* be forthcoming in Part 2 (tentatively entitled "Making Agreements and Settling Debts." Until it's ready to go, we hope you've enjoyed this set up...and in that vein, we would mind knowing what thoughts have crossed your mind in the meantime. As ever, thanks to all our readers (new and old). We hope we haven't disappointed.~_


	2. Pt 2: Telling Tales Out of School

**Hand to Hand**

**By:** dharmamonkey & Lesera128

**Rated: **M

**Disclaimer: **Here we posit our normal rigmarole. No, we don't own anything from _Bones _or _Angel... _or anything else. Yes, we're wreaking what havoc we can with these characters that we don't own to create an awesome story. But, since it's only for the purposes of creative enjoyment and amusing distraction, we think we're okay. Are there any other questions? No? ::blinks:: Good. Then, moving on―

**Summary: **See Part I.

**Logistical Notes: **See Part I.

**A/N: **In keeping with Dharmasera tradition, Part II became very long—so long, in fact, that we had to break it into two parts...so that it wouldn't be unwieldy for our readers...again. As, yes, technically what has ballooned into Parts II and III was all, initially, just Part I. How's that for a fun fact? So we'll be brief in the only place it's apparent that we can be concise...our author's note. So, without further ado...

**UNF Alert: **Oops. Not necessary yet, folks. But don't worry. It's coming. Just be patient. That patience will be amply rewarded when the time is right. We promise.

* * *

**Part II: Telling Tales Out of School**

* * *

Booth considered Spike's question for a minute, breathing a long sigh as he realized he had little choice but to lay his cards on the table and give an honest answer.

"Spike," he began, his voice thick and warm as he looked into the vampire's pale, icy eyes. "I-I...I guess...well, things are different for me now. That life I had before, you know, I don't have that kind of life anymore. I've got...well, just look at her..."

He smiled sweetly and gestured towards his infant daughter, who seemed to have quieted down, leaving Booth wondering if she'd in fact, by some unforeseen miracle, fallen asleep.

"That life I had back then, back in L.A., before...well, it's gone. The life I have now is here, with my two girls—this little one and her beautiful mom—and I wanted you to see it with your own two eyes. This is what I have now, and it's everything I've ever wanted. It's what I want, and what I've got to protect, and I didn't think you'd completely believe me about how serious I am, especially about the part about Buffy, unless you could see things for yourself with your own two eyes. So that's why you had to come here. That's why we had to do this in person, face-to-face. Because of her."

Spike's brow knit as he listened to his grandsire speak movingly of being a family man. "I hear you," he said. "But even if I buy all that, Angel, who's to say that you're not gonna change your mind when the newness of it all wears off, hmmm? You and Elphie are damn near still honeymooners, and you've got a bad case of starry new-daddy eyes. That sure as hell ain't gonna last forever, mate."

Kneading the inside of his lip between his teeth for a moment, Booth considered Spike's point, then narrowed a critical eye and shot the vampire an annoyed look. "We may just've gotten married," he said, "but Bren and I are hardly honeymooners. We've been together, off and on, for a hundred and fifty years. We've grown together. We're a part of one another. It's more than just..." Booth paused for a beat, grunted quietly as if in response to a question he'd silently posed to himself, then began to speak again.

"I love her, Spike," he said. "And I love this baby of ours. My wife and my daughter...they're my family. My life. And I will do anything—_anything_—for them. This little girl and her mother are my life now. That's all there is to it." He sighed and shrugged. "You can believe what I've gotta say as much as you can believe anything. Because of them? For them? Well... I know you're many things, but you're not either blind or stupid. Tell me you can't see for yourself that things aren't what they used to be. That _I'm_ not who I used to be." Booth reached up and scratched the back of his head, then breathed a soft sigh and looked at Spike, his brows raised and his forehead creased as he silently begged his old rival to understand him. "Come on, Spike. Tell me you know what I mean."

Spike listened to the explanation, and, hearing the gravity in Booth's voice, acknowledged him with a shrug of his shoulders as he conceded the point. "Fine," he answered. "You win. I've shot my wad, so the only other question I've got is...what do you need?"

Booth reached up and rubbed his stubbly chin as he gave his grandchilde an appraising look. Pursing his lips into a firm line, he closed his eyes, then nodded and quietly said, "I need you to help me and—"

His words were suddenly cut off as the baby let out a shrill squeal. Booth turned towards the baby, his brow knitting with concern as he looked down and breathed a relieved sigh when he saw the reason why she had suddenly started to fuss. Reaching for the pacifier that had fallen to her side when she spit it out prior to her impromptu staring game with Spike, he cut off what he suspected might be a mind-rendingly horrific crying jag by promptly sticking it back in her mouth. The infant shot him a look that seemed to eerily echo one Brennan often gave him that seemed to say, 'Is that the best you can do? Because, if it is, I suppose it will have to do, but only until I think of what else I want.'

"Oh, cut it out, alright?" Booth told the baby with a slight frown of exasperation that he'd often shot his wife over the years when she was being difficult just because she could be. "Stubborn for stubborn's sake, aren't ya, hmm?" he asked her. "Just like your mama. Between the two of you, you've already given me some gray whiskers, and before you're done, you two are gonna give me a whole head of gray hair, you know that?" He shook his head and sighed as he watched the baby move the pacifier between her lips with a crinkle-browed look on her face. "So come on. You know that's what you want, so quit fighting me, and just take the binky and suck, okay?" He rolled his eyes and began speaking again in a somewhat hushed tone. "Look, kiddo," he said. "We both know the last thing you want is to go from zero to 180 miles an hour just because you can. You know you can. I know you can. You know I know you can. So just be cool for a bit longer, okay, because Daddy's trying to have an important conversation here."

The baby scrunched her mouth and for a second seemed like she might start wailing after all, but after shooting him one final look, reluctantly began to chew on the pacifier.

Spike watched the entire exchange in curious amusement as he listened to his grandsire chatter to his baby daughter about her mother. Aside from a few of Darla's dinner parties back in the last couple of decades of the nineteenth century, he hadn't actually spent much time in the company of both Brennan _and _Angelus at the same time. Sure, separate and apart he felt pretty good about his knowledge of each of them individually. But together? Not so much.

He wondered what Brennan—the sharp-tongued, sharp-witted witch who he knew always to be a woman who did what she wanted, when she wanted, with whomever she wanted—would be like as a mother and a wife. Sure, he knew that she and Angel had shacked up together in Chicago during the mid-to-late-1920s, and again in the early 80s, and had lived together on and off for much shorter stretches of time over the course of the eighty-some years they'd carried on since reuniting in 1923, but he also knew Brennan was a woman who spoke her mind and fiercely guarded her independence. He struggled to see her at home, sitting in a rocking chair with the blue-eyed, auburn-haired cherub tucked in her arm, feeding the child a bottle as a meatloaf baked in the oven and National Public Radio droned on in the background while she waited patiently for her husband to come marching through the door with his briefcase and a bag of Pampers.

"I kinda can't see Brennan as a mum," he said somewhat absently. He saw Booth's brown eyes widen and his nostrils flare, then realized what he said. "I don't mean it like that, mate, it's just—well, she never struck me as the maternal type, you know?" He paused and grimaced. "Far's I ever heard, she never had any brats runnin' about, not in all the years she's been around, so after all this time, it just seems a bit odd, her decidin' to have a baby and all."

Booth stared at the vampire for a minute, hesitating as he made certain there weren't any hidden insults in his comments, then grunted his agreement. "Well," he said, "it was kind of, uhh..." His voice trailed off for a few seconds and he sighed, then finished his thought. "Umm...there were special circumstances."

A smirk curved Spike's lips as he cocked his head to one side and laughed. "Oh yeah?" he mused.

"Yeah," Booth said with a sheepish grin. "I mean, it was definitely unexpected on both our parts, but especially on her end, and so, like I said, it was kind of an unusual situation and—"

"'Special circumstances'?" Spike snickered. "_Riiiiight._ I see how it is now." He stamped his foot on the ground, clearly highly amused at his grandsire's admission. Tucking his hands into the pockets of his leather duster, he shook his head and suddenly added with a laugh, "You seem to have a habit of spawning little sprogs under offbeat circumstances, don't ya? I mean, first, you knock up Darla even though us vamps have been well known to be shootin' blanks for who knows how many centuries, and now you go an' get the Wicked Witch of the West up the duff, even though she's been out there workin' her wares for four hundred-odd years now." He laughed again at his own summation of the situation before he leveled a teasing stare at Booth. "So tell me—is there some kind of bloody mystical properties to your spunk, mate?" He nodded at Booth with an upward jerk of his chin, still chuckling. "Tell me she whelped this little tyke in a hospital and not in a dark alley in the middle of a rainstorm..."

Booth shook his head and shot Spike an annoyed look. "No, my kid was born in a hospital," he said, his tone of voice edged with the irritation as he rolled his eyes. "George Washington University Hospital, about ten minutes that way." He indicated the northward direction with his thumb. "It was a textbook delivery after twenty-six hours of labor on Bren's part, most of which went by when her stubborn ass was at a fucking conference in Baltimore at Johns Hopkins because she just absolutely had to give one last academic paper before she delivered. And no—no stakes involved this time," he grumbled. "You know, just in case you were wondering."

"Huh," Spike chuckled, his eyes flicking over to watch the child suck on her pacifier. "Elphie always did do things on her own terms and on her own clock, ehh?" he observed wryly. "Never changes that one. Neither do you, perfect damn matched pair that you are. Both of you stubborn as bloody mules."

He let the observation go with a faint wave of his hand as he settled his gaze once more on the child. There was something about the baby—her eyes, perhaps, he mused as he glanced back at her, but even then he couldn't quite make up his mind—that struck him as out of the ordinary. He shrugged away the errant thought and was quiet for a moment as he considered the irony of the situation. He wondered if, like her older half-brother Connor, the new baby's birth had been at least as bizarre and dramatic as when her parents at last had become informed of her impending arrival given how grand a finale her final entry into the world had been.

"So," he began. "Did Elphie at least not disappoint when she told you about the news that you were going to be a daddy, or does she lose out on style points to Darla on that one, too?"

"Style points?" Booth groused. "What do you mean?" He felt his jaw tighten and realized, again, that he was letting Spike's incessant needling get the best of him. He took a breath and sighed, letting the sound rattle in the back of his throat knowing the vampire would hear it.

"Easy there, boyo," Spike said with a roll of his eyes. "I'm just wonderin', you know, how Brennan broke the news to you? Because I know Elphie's many things, but I'd never say she was trite. But from the sounds of it, it seems like she was taking more than a page or two out of dear great-grand mum's playbook there."

Booth's heavy brow knit into a furrow and he felt his temples tense as the vampire's verbal jabbing once again mentioned the sultry, husky-voiced blonde who was the matriarch of the lethal little Whirlwind family of which the dark-eyed agent used to be the favored son and _de facto_ patriarch. "Why would even bring _her_ up now?" he grumbled. "I mean...really?"

"Oh, please...don't get your poncy knickers in a twist." Rolling his eyes, Spike clarified, "I'm just wonderin', mate, how'd she tell you that..." He let his voice trail off as he gave a distressed grunt in the direction of the baby carrier. "You know..."

The vampire's voice edged slightly higher as his curiosity got the better of him and his frustration began to mount. Hearing the change in Spike's tone, Booth bit back a smirk and decided he shouldn't waste the opportunity to turn the tables on his grandchilde.

"What?" he asked innocently, unable to suppress a faint snicker. Following Spike's eyes, he looked over at his daughter and gave the little one a wink before he turned back to the vampire and said. "You know, Bren does this to me, too—tossing out some kind of vague question and expecting me to be some kind of brainiac mind-reader and know what she's asking. She always has...and now, I guess she's been giving you lessons." He shoved his right hand in his pocket and began rolling his three-year Gamblers Anonymous coin between his fingers. "I swear, she'd be a disaster cut loose in an interrogation room by herself. I mean, the suspect would die of old age before she got around to actually asking a question straightforward enough for a normal person to comprehend."

"For fuck's sake, Angel," Spike growled. "You sure as fuck know what I meant, you blinkered bumsucker. No need to budge up on Elphie there when she's not here to defend herself. But since you wanna be difficult. Fine. Unlike some rambling scatterbrains I know, I can be both a gentleman _and _direct—" Spike gave Booth a heavy-lidded look as if to say that the latter's intentional denseness was boring him to the point of exhaustion. For his part, Booth just snorted and rolled his eyes, a faint crooked-mouthed grin curving his lip as he mindlessly rolled the plastic coin between his fingers. "Holy hell," he sighed. "What I meant is how did you take hearin' you were gonna be a daddy?"

Booth shrugged and decided to give in, his patience for the game wearing thin considering the gravity of the circumstances which still weighed heavily on him. He hesitated for another beat, his eyes darting back to the car seat as he observed his infant daughter, then said with a bit of a serious look still on his face, "A whole hell of a lot better than I did the first time, but I guess that's not saying very much, is it?"

A grin spread across Spike's face. "So, she didn't slug you like Darla did?" he snickered, remembering how Brennan had related to him the story Darla had told her about the night she'd confronted Angel to inform him of her pregnancy.

"No," Booth said, his lip curling a little. A thought suddenly occurred to him as he shot Spike a look. "And hey—who told you about that, anyway?" He made a face as he silently thanked God that Spike _hadn't _been there to witness that night. "It had to have been Gunn, right?"

He remembered standing in the lobby of the Hyperion with Cordelia, Wesley, Fred, and Gunn when Darla walked in, her bright red dress stretched taut over her pregnant belly, a completely hateful smirk on her face as she made her unspoken announcement to him of his impending fatherhood, completely derailing what he'd planned as a perfect moment for when he was finally going to confess his feelings to Cordelia.

_I guess I owe Darla for that one, too_, Booth thought ironically as he recalled the night he'd learned of his first impending fatherhood. _What a fucking disaster that would've been if I gotten farther than I did before Darla went all 'Jerry Springer/Hi Daddy' on me. Christ...the only thing that could've made it worse was if someone like Bren or Buffy or Spike __had__ been there to witness it._

When no answer was forthcoming from Spike, Booth prodded. "Come on, Spike. Tell me. I want to know. Who told you?"

"Pssssh," Spike snorted with a dismissive wave of his hand. "No, mate, it wasn't Gunn. Ol' Charlie boy, after coming out the other side of his walk on the wild side..." He saw in Booth's puzzled expression the first definitive indication that his grandsire really had been completely unplugged and out of touch with what had been happening in Los Angeles since his abrupt disappearance several years earlier. "Well," he continued, a certain uncharacteristic tentativeness in his voice as he wondered how to explain what had happened in the ensuing years. "Gunn got turned, you know."

"Turned?" Booth blurted out, his brown eyes widening as his mouth hung open with surprise. "You mean _turned _turned?"

He swallowed, wincing as he remembered standing in a damp, dark cobblestone-paved alley behind a tavern near Galway's quayside, gazing into the flickering green eyes of the most beautiful, enchanting woman he'd ever seen, and then, not a minute later, feeling her razor-sharp teeth sink into the side of his neck after she'd promised to show him a whole new world—a world full of things he'd never seen or even heard of. The sharp pain had seemed to tear at the base of his skull for a couple of seconds before he'd felt his legs give way under him as he crumpled to the ground. He'd clenched his fingers into a tight fist as he remembered the way the damp dirt had crumbled between his fingers as he'd clawed his way out of his own grave. The pain of being born was worse than the pain of dying he'd found out that night.

"_Birth is always painful," _Darla had told him when he'd awakened to a new world. _For all of her many, __many__ faults,_ Booth thought wryly, _she was right about that one. Straight up...completely and totally right. Birth...in all its many forms, is always painful._

He was lost for a moment in his thoughts when the baby's errant gurgle drew his attention to the present. He couldn't help but remember all the pain associated with the happy accident of fate that had led to the events that had culminated in Kathryn's conception and eventual birth. Not even a year had passed since the night Brennan had broke the spell and with a single kiss opened the floodgates that dumped 250 years worth of memories on him, and the pain of that experience—in its own way a sort of birth, or rebirth—was still very fresh in his mind. Even clearer in his memory was the night on which his daughter had been born not even three months earlier: the way Brennan's body heaved with pain as the contractions seized her, and the howling cry his daughter made at drawing her first lungful of breath.

_Birth is always painful, _he'd been told, but little had he known as he'd stood in that Galway alley how painful it was, or how many times he'd be born and reborn over the centuries, each time an agony of its own.

Indeed, even regaining his humanity—a long sought-after goal that he'd finally attained in the midst of the battle to return L.A. from the depths of hell to which it had been consigned by the Senior Partners of Wolfram & Hart—had proved a mixed blessing. He'd fulfilled the Shanshu Prophecy, and depending on whom you listened to for who deserved credit for him fulfilling the prophecy (either the benevolent Powers that Be or the more nefarious Senior Partners) it had been a double-edged sword. His reward—also his curse, depending on how you looked at it—it had turned out, ended up being painful in ways he'd never have imagined it would. He remembered how strange it had felt to feel his heart beating in his chest again for the first time in 250 years, and how the sensation had been so intense and so alien, he swore could actually feel the blood coursing through his veins. But the real pain of the fulfilled prophecy came the first time his living blood was spilled, for it was then the weight of being human and mortal struck him like an anvil.

He felt his heart race a little at thinking of his old friend Gunn going through the pain of birth, death and rebirth, and a flash of fear surged through him at the thought—foolish though it was—of what it be like to go through all of that agony again himself and how he hoped he or anybody he ever loved was faced with that horrible curse ever again.

Seeing Spike's slight nod, he drew a sharp breath and looked down at his feet, feeling suddenly a bit light-headed at the idea that not only had he changed since he left behind his other life, but that life—that world—had changed, too. He felt a flash of guilt when he considered how he'd left everyone in that world in the lurch when he vanished, but he quickly shrugged away the thought as he heard the slurping sound of his daughter sucking noisily on her pacifier. "I'm sorry," he said, an honesty and a sadness in his tone as he brought his eyes up to meet Spike's. "I'm really sorry to hear that..."

"Well, it _was _some nasty business for awhile, with him headin' up a sketchy band of vamps for a time," Spike admitted. "Still, long story short, he came out of it okay."

"What do you mean?" Booth asked, his brow knitting low over his dark, gleaming eyes. "I mean, how did he get unvamped again?"

Spike held his hand up and waved off Booth's query. "It's kind of a long story, that I'll be happy to share the next time I've got nothing better to do and you're buying. But for now? That's not what we're here to talk about, eh, mate?" The agent shrugged and nodded, encouraging Spike to carry on. "Anyways," the vampire continued. "While you may not have problems when the sun comes up, I'm running against a clock here, Gramps, so let's just say I'm pretty sure he and the Junior Bint still keep in touch with the Blue Meanie, fightin' the good fight, as it were." He fell silent for a moment, thinking about the woman he left behind in New York when he'd skipped town to come down to D.C. "Last I heard, they'd taken up residence in your old stompin' grounds—that shady hotel of yours."

Booth frowned. "Aww, come on," he grumbled. "I kinda got the place cleaned up after I got it for a song—basically, paid the property tax arrearage that the prior owners had racked up and..." He saw the other man's eyes roll with exaggerated indifference and gave a sheepish shrug. "Once we tidied the place up a bit, it wasn't _that _bad. Okay, so the rooms were dated and a few smelled so bad of cigarette smoke even re-painting and re-carpeting didn't help, but all in all, it's not a bad place for the crew." After a moment, he asked, "Do they still, you know, use the place?"

"They still kind of keep to their own," Spike answered as he leveled his blue gaze at Booth. "If that's what you're asking."

Booth's head jerked back, and his dark eyes blinked then narrowed in confusion, swiveling from one side to the other as he puzzled over the remark.

"Think of it like this," he explained. "They're like one o' them militias that fight their own fight, 'helpin' the helpless' to use your old slogan, while the big guns—Buffy and her merry band o' Slayers—march on in their never-ending war against the proverbial forces of darkness."

Booth stood there in an awkward, somewhat stunned silence for a few seconds, realizing in that moment how life in L.A. and, moreover, the battles he'd been fighting there, had clearly continued without him. He took a certain comfort in that as he blinked away the memories of the time he spent fighting in the war against the Senior Partners in the months before Brennan made her bargain with The One and swept him out of L.A. and out of the life he'd led there.

Spike raised his brows, his forehead creasing as he watched the thoughtful flicker behind his grandsire's dark eyes.

"Anyway, I heard all about _that _particular greatest hit of yours from your lady love," Spike grinned, bringing the subject back to where it had been before they veered off track. "You know, ol' Darla's big reveal. Elphie told me all about it." He blinked and watched for Booth's reaction, which came quickly as the other man's brows furrowed deeply though he gave no immediate response other than a quiet, scarcely audible growl of annoyance.

After a long moment of wordlessly glaring at Spike, Booth finally shook his head, deeply unnerved that his grandchilde and his wife seemed to have kept in far closer contact over the years than he'd ever imagined.

"So wait, what?" he groused. "Are you two like long-time pen-pals or something?"

Spike gave a wicked grin and with a quick upward jerk of his chin said, "Something like that, yeah." Biting back a laugh as he saw how aggravated that little revelation seemed to be for Booth, he shrugged and changed the subject again. "I told you, Angel, Elphie and me came to an understandin' a _long_ time ago. So," he prompted. "I know she wasn't very impressed with how things turned out when she told me you used that little trick on Darla. I can only guess she liked it even less when you pulled a repeat on her of all people. So did she kick your ass when she found out you'd knocked her up?"

"No," Booth said, shaking his head solemnly. "Though I'm pretty damn sure at the very least she thought about it." He paused, then added, "In fact, just between you and me, I'm still kinda shocked as hell she didn't try to finally do me in for good when she found out."

_The Christmas lights twinkled as Brennan stared at the bright strands of red, blue, green, and orange that alternated on chaser strings in front of her on the tree Booth had decorated the night before. He'd been so proud when he'd brought it home two days before, regaling her with the tale of the bargain he'd gotten two weeks before Christmas. He'd boasted of his buying acumen as he explained to her how he'd talked the guy at the tree lot down ten bucks from the price he'd originally wanted and had gotten the guy to load it into the SUV and toss in a free wreath before he was done. Now, having stared at the tree for as long as she had that day, Brennan wanted nothing more than to set it on fire and watch it burn in a tremendous blaze. Fortunately for Booth, she was too weak to do much more than lay there and stare at it, occasionally blinking when she made a face that she hoped reflected the intense feelings of hatred, repugnance, and resentment she felt. _

_She shivered a bit as she lay there looking at the tree, because the window that she'd insisted that they leave open because she'd been too hot earlier now seemed to be letting in too much of the cold December air. Her nose twitched for what seemed like the thousandth time in a hour as the strong scent of the fresh balsam pine once again assaulted her nostrils. She was so tired that she barely had enough strength to lift her head from the pillow she'd been laying on for the past several hours. The retching that had confined her to the couch before Booth had come home seemed to have finally passed, but the ordeal had still left her weak and unhappy, and as she sniffed the noxious odor of the Christmas tree, she wondered if the pine scent would set her off again since her delicate stomach seemed to be giving her a preliminary warning when she felt a familiar roiling in her belly._

_"Please, God, no," she muttered, her voice hollow and drained when she spoke. "I can't stand another bout of vomiting. I hate vomiting. I absolutely detest it. No more..."_

_A series of clicks and clacks sounded from the end of the hall as the front door's double-deadbolts unlocked and the door swung open. _

_"Bones?" came a quiet voice from the entryway. She didn't move her head, but she did swivel her eyes in the general direction where it seemed the source of the sounds had come from, and immediately wished that she hadn't, because the world began to spin slightly as she lost her point of orientation._

_"Ughhh," she grunted. "God, not again."_

_Booth walked into the living room from the foyer and saw her curled up on the couch, her arms folded snugly around her chest.. Even from ten feet away he could see her face was pale, her hair pulled back in a messy, careless ponytail as tiny wisps of hair stuck to her sweaty forehead. Her eyes were open but she didn't look up, though she did look over at him as he opened the gunsafe and put his service pistol away safely as he dropped his keys on the hall table. He saw her scowl in his general direction before she grumbled something unintelligible, uttering a _'hrrrummph' _sound as she closed her eyes again._

_"Bones?" he said again as he approached the sofa, almost a boyishness in his tone as he pleaded with her. "Please," he said, his mouth set in a sympathetic pout. "Let me help. Tell me what to do. Tell me how I can make it better."_

_Smacking her cracked and unusually dry lips, she said, "Come closer so I can stop having to twist around to see you, Booth. I'm getting...ugh...dizzy again. And, if I resume vomiting, it's going to be all your fault, and you're finally going to see how dangerous it really is after 150 years to have really pissed me off." She paused, let out a small, soft sigh as she prayed to whatever entity was listening to please help her avoid the vomiting she sensed was imminently threatening an encore performance. "It's going to be all your fault," she repeated, her voice still low as she then muttered, "in more ways than one."_

_Slowly, he came around the couch and bent low in front of her so that she could see him without moving again. "Bones?" he said quietly, his voice edging higher in pitch as his brow creased with worry._

_He frowned as he wondered if he'd brought home the stomach bug that had been going around the bullpen a couple of weeks earlier without realizing it. His field details ran roughly 10% understrength due to sickday call-ins for about ten days before it seemed everyone who was going to catch it had_—_except for him. More disturbing than that, the thought suddenly occurred to him, he wondered if one of the squints managed to create or unleash some kind of nasty supergerm at the lab that had infected her. The latter scenario, while creepy and not completely out of the realm of possibility, seemed unlikely since any supergerm she got would probably have sickened him, too, and he felt absolutely fine. _

_As he thought about it, he realized that she'd seemed worn down for a couple of weeks, the bright blue of her eyes now dimmer than it usually was, almost waxy and dull, which made him think maybe that whatever was wrong had to do with her powers—maybe some kind of out-of-whack mojo. He'd thought about calling his father-in-law, or more likely, Max's partner Steph (who Booth didn't know as well but who didn't seem to hate him as much as Max did), but he'd held off, figuring that whatever it was would eventually go away...and besides he knew he didn't really want to see Max, and Max didn't really want to see him since Brennan's father had been so touchy and downright hostile after Max found out that the two had gotten married just after Halloween. So Booth had waited, hoping that things would take care of themselves as they always seemed to where Bren was concerned._

_But it didn't. _

"_I'm sorry, lass," he said sympathetically. "I hate seeing you under the weather like this. Come on, Bones..."_

_"What?"_

_"You've...you've been sick for a while now," he told her, gently touching her wrist as she folded her arms even more tightly in front of her chest and frowned. "Maybe...maybe you need to let me take you to the doctor...because it doesn't seem to be getting any better. It just seems to be getting worse. Look, I'm starting to get worried here."_

_She looked at him for a long moment. His warm brown eyes looked at her with concern, which in a way reminded her of the kind of wistful sadness she'd grown used to seeing in those eyes in the years after his ensoulment and their reunion in Chicago, but was even more solicitous and, rather than his usual inward-turning brooding, came with an angled head and a nod, and a touch from his big, strong hand as it reached out to comfort her. She felt her foul mood temporarily lift, but as another wave of nausea swirled in her belly, that feeling of ease quickly fled, replaced again by ire. _

_"You should be worried," she said simply. A tired frown crossed her normally energetic face and she added, "But, not for the reason you think." She stopped, a sardonic look on her face as she chuckled, some of the bitterness she'd felt since she'd found out the reason for her illness coming into her voice. "No, you'd never guess this one, Booth, not if you had a thousand lifetimes to live and all the time you wanted to try and figure it out."_

_"Huh?" he blurted out, his broad forehead creasing deeply as his eyes swiveled around in confusion. "What are you talkin' about, Bones?" He looked at her for a long moment, worried about her even more now that she'd begun talking in vague, nonsensical grumbles. "You're kinda rambling and not making much sense, lass," he said, his voice gentle as he spoke. Surveying her face and seeing how pale and clammy her skin looked, and noting the dark circles under her tired eyes, he wondered if she was a little feverish. "You're shivering, Bren, and you look cold." He made a face, and at last tired of feeling helpless, offered, "Maybe you're running a fever, huh?" He nodded at her encouragingly and moved into action as he spoke. "Lemme get you some Tylenol or something, alright?" He felt bad for her, and glanced over his shoulder towards the kitchen, wondering if he actually knew where she'd tucked away her stash of headache medicines. "How about it, huh? You're starting to worry me a bit here."_

_For some reason, Booth's otherwise commonplace and innocent words set off a hormonal Brennan. She felt a flash of irritation that quickly spiraled into outright frustrated annoyance as she sat up without thinking and grunted, "You __should__ be worried." She repeated her prior statement_ _immediately regretting her impulsive decision to try and go from a horizontal worldview to a vertical one in such a short period of time_ _as she muttered, "But, not for the reason you think."_

_"Why then?" Booth asked, his forehead wrinkling again in puzzlement, as he frowned, concerned as he watched her sit up that she was going to try and stand when she was obviously weak and woozy. He took a half-step backwards and held his hand out as if to discourage her from getting up. "Tell me. What's going on, Bren?" _

_Brennan studied him for a long moment, feeling a swirl of emotions as she realized that she'd not only needed to tell him, but wanted to tell him for several reasons. Nodding at him, as another hormonal swing took her, she finally said, "Fine. I'll tell you. Because it's not like you don't need to know or aren't going to find out sooner or later anyway." _

_She paused as an image of an overly cocky and very smug, self-pleased grin lighting up Booth's face flashed through her mind. The idea of seeing such a stereotypical male reaction to her news rubbed her the wrong way in that moment. That thought was, however, quickly replaced by another one, i.e., the same one that she'd struggled with since she'd found out why she hadn't felt like her normal self for weeks. And, even after all that time, she still didn't have a satisfactory answer, so she was fairly positive she couldn't handle the inquisitorial stream of questions that she suspected would follow her announcement. Deciding it was wise to try to preempt such a response as much as possible, she then added, "But, if you ask me how did this happen, I don't care how sick or tired or weak I am—I'll find some way to get up off this couch and hit you as hard as I can."_

_"Okaaay," he said tentatively, arching a wary eyebrow as he watched her eyes flicker with an emotion he couldn't quite read but which he was fairly certain, judging by her testy tone of voice, didn't bode well for him. His fingers quivered a little as he wanted to reach out and brush the messy strands of hair off of her forehead, but the tense way she held her square jaw left little doubt that this was one of those classic 'Danger, Will Robinson' moments he'd learned to recognize over the years. He took a hesitant breath, then nodded and said, "Alright...tell me then."_

_Her blue eyes leveled a strong gaze at Booth's brown ones for a very long minute before she finally let go of the breath she'd been holding and began to explain. _

_"I'm not sick because of any illness," Brennan said evenly. "I'm sick because I've contracted what seems to be a severe case of morning sickness."_

_Booth stared at her dumbstruck, his breath catching in his throat for a couple of seconds before he coughed a little and swallowed hard, his brown eyes widening as he silently mouthed the words 'morning sickness.' He blinked a couple of times, looking away for a moment as he shook his head, not entirely certain that he'd actually heard her correctly. He opened his mouth to say something, then closed it again as he replayed her words in his mind. After another second or two, he looked up at her and stammered, "But, I, uhh...I don't...but how—"_

_"Don't," she growled, as she suddenly dreaded that her fear was coming true and moved to try one last time to head off his onslaught of questions. "Don't you dare say it or, I swear to God, Booth—"_

_"A baby?" he whispered, the pinched, hesitant expression on his face softening as his furrowed brows flew up and his cheeks flushed warmly. He breathed a sigh of relief and laughed as a dumb smile slowly spread across his face. "Wait...Bones, are you...?"_

_"Yes, damn it," she huffed and swallowed thickly, suddenly feeling as if a weight had been removed from her chest as all the chaotic thoughts and turbulent emotions she'd felt since she'd discovered the root cause of her illness began to spill forth. "I'm certain," she told him firmly. "I have three PhDs, and an IQ of almost 200. Do you really think I would make such a claim if it hadn't been substantiated? Of course, I'm certain. Although I definitely know how, I'll concede that I may not really know why, but yes. The answer is 'yes.' Fuck it all to hell. Yes!" _

_She stopped to take a breath as she realized she was ranting. Struggling to regain control of herself, she coughed and she cleared her throat, then, when she felt that she was at least a tad bit more in control of her emotions, she looked over at him with another sigh. _

"_I know this is unexpected news to say the least, but I hope you take it better then you said you did when you found out Rebecca was pregnant with Parker," she said edgily. "But, since we're already married, I'm not sure what grand gesture you could make to demonstrate your devotion to me and the new family unit we've apparently created_..." _She paused again as she saw his face take on a goofy smile just as she'd known it would. _

_Shaking her head in obvious irritation, she muttered, "I hope you're happy. I hope you're proud of yourself. Because, yes, I'm pregnant." She paused and then narrowed her eyes as she looked at him as she jabbed a finger in the air in his general direction. "I'm pregnant, and, it's all your fault. You and your damn..." She blinked several times and averted her eyes, shaking her head once more as she quickly skimmed through which of Booth's attributes she blamed most for their current predicament, finally settling on the one that was most offensive to her. "You and your damn possessiveness."_

_Booth heard the hard edge to her voice and felt a wave of déjà vu crash over him as he remembered the other two times he'd been told by a woman that she was pregnant with his child. Two different women, in two different lifetimes, broke the news to him with a fiery glimmer in their eyes and an angry edge to their voices. _

_One, Rebecca, had been waiting for him on the couch on a Tuesday night when he'd gotten back to Fort Benning after a week-long field exercise at Camp Merrill in the mountains of northern Georgia. He'd been surprised to find her there, since she wasn't supposed to drive down from Atlanta until that Friday, and he'd known from the hard look in her green eyes that she was angry. Figuring that she was still sore that he'd had to cancel their plans to go to the Tori Amos concert_**—**_which, to be honest, he wasn't that thrilled about going to anyway_**—**_he'd dumped his green canvas duffel bag in the hallway by the door and stood there for a second, giving her a charming, conciliatory smile before making his way to the kitchen to grab a couple of cold beers out of the fridge. _

"_Don't bother," she'd said to him as she stood up from the sofa and walked over to the table in his tiny dining room where she'd stashed her purse. He'd just pulled a couple of Yuenglings out and was standing there with a bottle of beer in each hand when she pulled a white plastic stick out of her purse and held it up. For a second, he just stared, not even sure what she was showing him until he saw the plus sign in the stick's little window. He'd nearly dropped the beers as the color drained from his face. _

_He'd managed to set the beers on the counter, then walked over to her with a whispered, "Hey," and opening his arms to embrace her. She recoiled from his approach with a frown, dropping the pregnancy test onto the coffee table with a noisy clatter._

"_We can handle this," he'd said to her, his heart pounding in his chest as his mind raced with a mad whirl of excitement and worry. "Becks, it'll be okay. I love you, babe...we're gonna be okay...it's gonna be—"_

"_Don't you dare!" she snapped at him. "Jesus Christ, Seeley. You've got two years left in your goddamn enlistment. And I've got another year of law school to go..to say nothing of studying for the bar and passing the goddamn exam before I even get a job. So what am I supposed to do with all that and a baby, huh? I'm going to look like the fucking Hindenburg by the springtime when all the firms come to Emory to interview for summer clerkships. That's going to go really well, Seeley. Do they even make maternity business suits? I don't even fucking know. I-I just—"_

"_Becks, shhhh, it's gonna be okay, alright? Just—"_

"_Don't 'shhhh' me," she growled back, stepping away from him and tucking her hair behind her ear as her shimmering eyes welled with tears. "You have no idea...__no__ idea at all. Jesus...what am I going to do?"_

_Like the typical male trying to offer solace, Booth had then said the first thing that had come into his head. "Maybe the test was wrong," he offered weakly._

_Rebecca stared at him, nodded, and said, "You think I didn't think of that, Seeley?" She reached into her purse and pulled out a box that was clearly an unopened pregnancy test. "I brought a new one just in case you didn't believe me. So, come on. Let's get this over with so you can see the magic stick turn pink with that fucking plus sign."_

_Within the span of five minutes, she'd corralled him into the bathroom while she took the second test. And as they waited for the plus sign to appear, he'd done what he thought was the __right__ thing—the responsible thing, the loving thing—when he asked Rebecca to marry him even as the second positive sign confirmed the first test that said she was pregnant. The look of disbelief that had crossed her face told him what her answer was going to be before she uttered a word. But even that brief warning wasn't enough to keep his heart from breaking when she'd refused his proposal. In the end, he took a small amount of comfort after she told him that first, she would keep the baby, and second, that she supposed he was right that they'd find __some__ way to make things work for the sake of the baby since, like it or not, they were going to be parents. _

_The other time he'd been told by a woman that she was pregnant with his child—well, that was another kettle of fish entirely..._

_The mother of his other son had reacted even more badly when she learned of her pregnancy. Granted, the very fact that she'd become pregnant, and moreover that __he__ had impregnated her, came as a complete and utterly earth-shattering surprise at that point in time, being as he was then_—_a vampire. But that fact alone didn't entirely explain the way Darla broke the news to him of her pregnancy and his impending fatherhood. _

_He thought back to the night Darla appeared in the entryway at the Hyperion, her face pale and drawn, her belly swollen with child. He remembered how the sight of her pregnant belly had shocked him and would've taken his breath away, had he at that point been human enough to take a breath. Her husky voice had called out to him from the top of the landing as she let the visual of her swollen body make her announcement for her instead of having to verbalize it as Bren had just done, and she merely greeted him (with a voice dripping in resentment and spite that seemed to have some eerie similarities to Brennan's tone): "Hello, lover. Long time, no see."_

_With a shake of his head, Booth blinked away the memory and swung his thoughts back to the present as he gazed into his partner's pale, dark-rimmed blue eyes. His mouth fell open and for a couple of moments he struggled to find his bearings and the words to express himself before his brain circled back in a very delayed reaction to her accusation about his possessiveness._

_"Wait—what?" he asked with a crooked brow. The word—possessiveness—echoed in his head as he wracked his brain trying to figure out what the hell she was talking about. Sure, he'd been possessive of her (and her affections) in the past, especially before he was ensouled, but even after that, when he found out she was dating her professor, Michael Stires, while she was in graduate school at Northwestern. But he didn't understand what any of that had to do with her being pregnant in the here and now. Reaching up to rake his hand through his hair, he narrowed his eyes and asked, "What do you mean?"_

_"I'm due at the end of July, Booth," Brennan snapped, cocking her head to the side with a sardonic roll of her eyes. "I assume you still have enough residual mental capacity to do the damn math, correct?"_

_He stood there for a minute, silent and open-mouthed. A wave of uncertainty passed through him, and he blanched as another gush of memories oozed into his consciousness. "July?" he gulped, looking up at the ceiling as he counted the months backward on his fingers. "That means..." Quickly his mind worked as a realization suddenly dawned. "Ohhh," he muttered. His mouth fell open as his eyes widened and a bit of an uncertain smirk crept across his face, making the little breath he exhaled sound a bit like a chuckle, as he remembered how the marathon sex sessions they'd had made him feel that he'd represented himself pretty well for being a human. Looking back at Brennan, he quickly wiped his face of any type of look that in any way could be considered smug when he saw her radiating what he was afraid might be the faintest bit of blue electricity. "Wait," he said. Looking over at her, even though he knew the answer from how furious she looked, he still felt a need to ask and regretted it almost as soon as he spoke. "So are you saying then...for sure? Halloween?"_

_"Yeah," Brennan nodded emphatically. "Halloween."_

Spike stared at Booth for almost a minute before he reached out and snapped his fingers, then waved his hand in front of the FBI agent's face since it was clear that the man had obviously spaced out for a moment.

"Hey, tosser," he said. "Yoo-hoo! Earth to Angel. Come in..."

Swatting Spike's hand away with his forearm, Booth scowled slightly as he refocused on the blonde vampire and said, "Hey, cut that the fuck out."

Spike blinked at him and then smirked as he snickered. "Careful, there, Daddy. Aren't you not supposed to be doing that in front of Bluebell, there?" Spike jerked his thumb in the direction of the car seat where Booth's daughter seemed to be watching the entire rather animated exchange between the human and the vampire with a curious sort of silent glee as she quietly sucked on her pacifier. "You know—with the language?"

"Look," Booth replied with a growl. "(a) What are you, the language police now? (b) Don't call her that, alright? She isn't a prized heifer we're taking to the county fair. Besides, 'Bluebell' makes it sound like we named her after that ice cream brand and while I'll be the first to admit that I friggin' love Bluebell ice cream, especially the Peaches and Homemade Vanilla kind that you can only get in the summertime..." He saw Spike's eyes narrow at the reference to the ice cream flavor. "And yes, peach is my favorite Bluebell flavor. Yeah, I know. Don't say another goddamn word, or I'll be rearranging your fangs for you, okay? In any case, you'll give her a complex."

"What?" Spike said as he turned back to the baby, and arched a curious blond eyebrow. "What'll give her a complex?"

"Calling her 'Bluebell' or whatever other stupid, dumbass nickname you want to give her," Booth told him. "And a free piece of advice...just in case it should happen somehow, don't ever, _ever _do it in front of Bren. If you do, she'll have a class-one, grade-A shitfit. I don't even want to tell you the looks I get when I call her Katie—"

"Katie?" Spike asked with a suspicious glint in his eyes. "Oh, don't tell me that you named the wee tyke after—"

"My dead sister, yeah," Booth said with a grave nod of his head as he shot look a Spike that almost dared him to bust his balls about it. "So what if we did?"

"Talk about saddling the runtling with a bunch of baggage," Spike muttered with a sigh. "You really suck when it comes to choosing names, you know that? I mean, first you struck a home run with a pansy name like 'Angel,' then you chose the most effeminate ponce possible to give a fairly masculine name like Connor, and now this? Seriously, mate, all that considered, how can you really stand there and complain about me calling her something cute and affective like Bluebell when you went and weighed her with the name of—"

"The sister that I slaughtered in cold blood?" Booth offered, holding his jaw tensely as he bit out the words, since he knew Spike would say something worse if he didn't preemptively cut him off.

"Well," Spike began, studying him for a moment before nodding. "Yeah." He cocked his head and smirked wryly. "I mean, fuck, Angel, you may as well have named her Buffy."

Booth grunted in unspoken agreement before he clarified. "Bren didn't particularly like that suggestion," he said sardonically. "And, besides, the name 'Kathryn' was her idea."

"_You want to name a little girl after my sister?" he asked. "My sister who..." He swallowed hard and couldn't bring himself to say the word—to give a name to what he'd done to his own family after Darla turned him into a vampire—as he felt a familiar feeling of bile rise at the back of his throat while a reflexive wave of guilt washed over him. "My sister," he tried again. "Who died over two hundred fifty years ago?" _

She'd taken him completely by surprise when she reached into one of the most haunting chapters of his distant but not-forgotten past to pull forth the name she proposed for a daughter.

_"And, if it's a boy," Brennan pressed relentlessly, ignoring his question. "And, if I want to name him Liam, you're telling me you'd be okay with that, too?"_

Booth loved his sons, but even so, he remembered how at that moment he'd prayed that the child that grew inside of her was a little girl, because he wasn't sure he could handle the prospect of raising a son named Liam.

_"A son of ours deserves to be named after someone other than me."_

At first, he hated the idea of naming a daughter for his slain sister, but not nearly as much as he hated the idea that Brennan conflated his anguish about his vampire past with what she supposed was a wistful yearning for another life with another woman's love. In the end, he gave in, telling himself that maybe, just maybe, by giving his slain sister's name to a child conceived in love, he might bring some peace to her memory and somehow atone, at least symbolically, for the family he'd destroyed two hundred fifty years ago.

"_Fine," he'd conceded. "Okay? Fine. You want to name her Kathryn, if it's a girl? Okay. Alright? We can call her Kathryn, but if it's a boy...like I said, Bren—no Liams...no Williams...no Wilhelms...no Guillaumes...no Guillermos...not any other fuckin' variant thereof. I'm not having my son named for the drunken, worthless jagoff I used to be, or God forbid, having Spike thinking we named the baby after him. So, I'm drawing a line in the sand on this one. We can compromise if it's a girl, but if it's a boy, no dice. I'd rather we name him Max, Jr., than Liam, so that should tell you something. Got it? Liam's a no-go." _

Booth shrugged away the memory. "Anyway, Bren insisted, actually," he clarified. "But, we don't call her Kathy...just Kathryn...usually." He leaned in towards the car seat, and seeing his daughter blink back at him several times, he felt his heart melt a bit. Unable to help himself, he used his index finger to tickle the baby's cheek as he said, "Unless Mommy's not around, right, Katie Bee?"

"Ughhh," Spike groaned as soon as Booth started talking to the baby. "That's it. Tales of Elphie's breastmilk and formula aside, you might as well dust me now if you're gonna insist on such nauseating displays of rebellious cuteness when it's obvious the missus there done has you _so_ whipped, Peaches." Spike reared his arm back and slung it out sideways and made a loudly exaggerated snapping, swishing sound that simulated the sound of a bullwhip.

Turning his head back to Spike, Booth resumed his earlier rant as he said, "(c) Human or not, I can still kick your ass, and we're about to finally cross that line where I finally get to cut loose on you since you've been pushing me to the edge since the minute you got here, so don't fuck with me, Spike, alright?" He felt his teeth clench, and he tried to ignore the dark swirl of nausea that flashed through his gut as he wondered how long he really would last in a fight with his old rival. Silently shrugging away the thought, he pursed his lips said, "And, anyway, so what if I let a curse word slip in now and then? It's not like it's not gonna happen in the fall once hockey season starts up again, and besides, I don't think Katie can understand what I'm saying—yet. So, put a sock in it, okay?"

Spike rolled his eyes again and said, "Okay, Angel. Fine." He stopped and then shook his head. "So, ummm, now that we've got the preliminaries out of the way, you want to get to the point and finally tell me why in the hell did you want me here?" He paused and gestured with his hand for Booth to speed it up. "If we could hurry this little _tête-à-tête _of ours up, I still might be able to get in a spot of sightseeing while I'm here in this nation's fine capital city." He paused, narrowed his eyes and added, "And, maybe, a spot of hell-raising, too, ehhh? A bloke I know up there in the Big Apple told me there was a great bar at 9th and F Street called 'Gleam' that I _really _needed to check out."

Booth studied Spike for a minute, trying to figure out how much the vampire might be putting him on when the baby made a noise that got his attention. He turned to look at his daughter, still tucked snugly in her car seat, swaddled in a fleece blanket that matched her light green onesie as she sucked on her pacifier and stared back at her father. Like Spike, he watched her eyes, which even at her tender age seemed to have a more intense gaze and focus than he'd read should be expected for an infant just ten weeks old.

_Just like your mom, huh? _he mused, a proud grin cracking the corners of his mouth. _Smarter than a whip and so far ahead of the freakin' game that the rest of us mere mortals are already left in your dust, huh? _

Although Brennan had told him he was letting his sentimentality get the better of him, he couldn't help but look at his daughter's almost-translucent porcelain skin, fluffy auburn hair, and cool blue eyes and wonder if her mother had looked this way when she was born back in 1533. On one of the rare occasions he'd actually wanted to ask one of the few people who could give him that answer, Max was still keeping his distance from Booth. While they'd seen each other plenty when either Brennan or Stephanie had been there to run interference, Booth hadn't really had a chance to have a quiet moment alone with his father-in-law. He made a mental note to find some time to have a one-on-one chat with Max, but in the meantime, as he looked down at his daughter, he felt a warmth spread through his chest as he thought of how completely he loved his child and the woman, who he'd loved for so long, who brought her into the world.

He could see his grandchilde out of the corner of his eye, watching him as he watched the baby, and Booth felt a chill run down his spine. It wasn't just that the vampire with the bleach-blond hair and piercing eyes was looking at him, but more that there was something distinctly unnerving about being watched by someone who was not human and who, Booth noted grimly, was immortal—just like he used to be, before he fulfilled the conditions of the Shanshu Prophecy and was rewarded with his humanity.

Most days, he didn't miss being what he used to be—condemned to a nocturnal existence, feeding each night on blood while making sure to scurry back indoors or underground in the sewers before dawn broke lest the lethal rays of the sun end him—but occasionally, there would be a fleeting moment now and again when he remembered what it used to be like. After a particularly rough game of club hockey, he'd nurse his sore shoulder or cut brow or swollen knuckle and recall how he was stronger then, faster and tougher, capable of recovering from wounds in a matter of hours that would take days or weeks to heal now that he was human. He saw it in the morning as he dragged his razor over his chin which was dotted with an increasing number of gray bits of stubble that were plain to see as the little hairs clung to the side of the sink. All these made him feel old and weak, things he never had to worry about before he earned the reward of his human life.

Indeed, each night, as he crawled into bed with Brennan, he was reminded of what he once was. He made love to her, losing himself in her even as he found himself unable to keep his mind from flashing back to the countless other nights he'd made love to her, or—where there was no tenderness and they came together to quench a basic need—fucked her hard, ruthlessly and relentlessly, until he'd finally satisfied her and sated his own substantial sexual thirsts. But except for the two days of sexual decadence that had resulted in their daughter's conception the previous fall, it hadn't been the same. These days, although Brennan seldom if ever said anything about it even in jest, Booth himself was acutely aware that, while he was good lover by human standards, he tired more easily and recovered more slowly than he used to when he was a vampire. Now that he was finally a man, a _mortal _man, he felt himself to be, in many ways, a mere shadow of the man he once was. Most of the time, he tried not to think about it and would push such thoughts aside, focusing instead on the here and now like Brennan did so expertly when it came to compartmentalizing things. But the awareness of what he'd once been, and that which he'd once been capable of—and the fact that he was _none _of those things any longer—inevitably bled through into his consciousness when he stumbled on a reminder of the life he used to have, let alone when he had to face it head on for necessity's sake like he had this night.

He felt Spike's stare drill into him, and he knew he had to finally face the music. It galled him to do it, and even more so to let his old rival see how much it galled him, but as he took one more look at the baby, he knew what he _had _to do. He'd begun this thing, and he'd see it through to the end. And that was that.

Booth was shaken from his ruminating daze by the sharp sound of a whistle.

"Ground control to Major McBroody," Spike said, a lazy grin hanging off his lips as the haunting sound of David Bowie's _Space Oddity _echoed in the back of his mind. "Hey, you're not allowed to get all quiet and mopey until _after _we're done with the agenda, alright?" Never one to wear a wristwatch, he studied the horizon and guessed he had another hour yet before dawn broke. "I know it's been a while, mate," he said with a slight roll of his eyes, "but it's time to hurry this show along before I turn into a pumpkin. You know—while _you're _still young."

Booth's lower jaw shifted forward and his lip curled at the thinly-veiled insult, which cut deeper at his insecurities than he would _ever _have admitted to the man standing before him. He considered a sharp retort, but then remembered his ultimate objective and knew it was better not to antagonize someone he was about to ask for a very big favor. Instead, he glanced down at his feet and drew a heavy sigh, then turned back to Spike with a faint nod.

"Alright," he said, the rough edge of his voice almost a growl as he met Spike's eyes. "Fine." He took a deep breath, and then said in a firm, clear voice, "It's like I said...I need your help."

Sensing the seriousness in Booth's voice, and recognizing in his shimmering gaze and sullen look the early signs that the dark-eyed ex-vampire teetering on the edge of one of his old brooding spells that would make their conversation last even longer than it already had, Spike resisted the impulse to needle him further and simply asked, "What kind of help?"

Booth's brow knit low over his eyes as he swallowed and said, "I want to be left alone." After a moment, he added, "Me and my family? I want us to be left alone, and not to have anybody from my past life traipsing in here and mucking things up." He glanced over his shoulder at the infant sitting in her car seat, sucking on her pacifier and wiggling her arms. "I just want to live in peace with my wife and my daughter," he said. "That's all."

For all of his earlier teasing, Spike heard the dark gravity in Booth's words and saw the worry etched into his face, carving deep creases in his forehead. "What can I do to help with that?" Spike asked. "I'm not sure I understand what you're asking here, boyo. So, let's spell it out nice and neat."

Booth drew a took breath and frowned. "Alright," he said quietly. "Basically, I need your help with three things."

Spike crossed his arms and then shrugged his shoulders. "Dr. Crane is listenin', mate," the vampire said.

"You know," Booth said. "I'm not sure that makes me feel much better, Spike. Frasier always gave decent advice to other people but his own life was pretty much a shambles."

Spike's brows knit over his eyes. "A shambles?" he groused. "My life's just fine, thank you very much. You're the one who asked me here to help you, not the other way around." Seeing Booth draw a sharp breath as his nostrils flared, Spike decided that, as much fun as it was to crack on his grandsire, the time for recreational needling had passed. "But be that as it may," he said. "Give it up. Tell me what you need."

"First," Booth began. "My life would really be great if you could help me to keep Buffy outta D.C." He lifted his brown gaze to meet Spike's pale blue one as he clarified. "It's gotta stop. No more dropping in to check on me. Not for any reason, not ever again. She needs to stay away."

"Holy hell," Spike said with a laugh. "Stop the presses. Hell has finally frozen over and this time ain't no false alarm. The apocalypse is truly upon us now. You an' me agreein' on somethin'? And you decidin' that it's high time to keep Goldilocks outta your area code? Yep." He paused for a moment, then his lips curved into a crooked grin. "Fuck me. Should've bought some of those effin Powerball tickets last week like Buffy was suggestin' to me. Probably would've finally run into a decent bit of money if I had." Spike emphasized his point with wide eyes and an exaggerated nod of his head.

Watching Spike go on for a minute, Booth finally sighed as he cocked his head to the side and shot Spike an annoyed look. "Come on," he grumbled. "I'm trying to be serious here."

Spike grinned. "Yeah, and so am I," the blond vampire said. When he saw not even an aggravated smirk forthcoming on Booth's face, he sobered a bit. "Okay, mate—either this is some kind of elaborate bloody joke, or I'm losing my mind. Or maybe you've finally cracked and lost yours." The vampire's eyes narrowed skeptically. "Unless...bloody hell...you been nabbed by one of those body-snatchin' demons again? Wait a minute. Maybe you're not really Angel. You're some nasty piece of sewer-dwelling business dressed up like Angel."

"What?" Booth coughed, as his head snapped up, and he scowled at his grandchilde. "What the fuck are you talking about _now_, Spike?"

"Well," Spike snorted. "That would definitely explain the wacky get-up you've taken to recently." He pointed at Booth's jeans and button-down shirt, then looked up, his brows raised as he looked at his grandsire's close-cropped haircut. "Yeah—it is real or is it Memorex? I'm gonna go with Memorex here, because this frat-boy chic doesn't isn't ringing true for me." Spike took a couple of steps back, a crooked grin hanging off his lips. "Maybe Bluebell over there is just a really elaborate and—I'll admit—very convincing prop."

Booth propped his hands on his hips. "Alright," he said. "You've really lost your shit this time, Spike. Did you accidentally wander your way over to Woodland and nosh on some poor kid who was strung out six ways to Sunday on crack or heroin or...I dunno...Orpheus? In which case, maybe I'm in some really deep kimchee. Shit—there's a good reason Lorne banned that shit and the nasty fuckers that were dealing it from his nightclub."

Spike leaned his head back, pursed his lips in as thoughtful a gesture as he could muster, nodding slowly before he couldn't contain his laughter any longer and snickered. "Okay, you ponce," he said. "While it still amazes me that your taste in clothes could actually have gotten worse—hell, I didn't even know it was effin possible for you to dress like an even bigger pouf than you used to, but hey, shame on me. Nothin' should surprise me anymore. The more things change, mate—"

"The more they stay the same," Booth snorted. "So I guess I should take some comfort in the fact that you're still an insufferable asshole, huh?"

Spike considered the response, and then his facial expression softened as he nodded, apparently convinced, and a smirk slowly crept across his face. His pale blue eyes swiveled around to glance at the infant, then he shrugged and turned back to Booth. "You were saying?"

Booth rolled his eyes and grunted, hesitating for a moment as he tried to recover his earlier train of thought, then began once more to speak. "Okay," he said. "Right, so like I said—first thing is I want Buffy to stay the hell outta D.C." He saw Spike give a bouncy nod, then continued. "Second, I don't want anyone else from that other life—the life I had in Sunnydale and L.A., or even before that, now that I think about it—knowing who or where I am."

"_Riiiight_," the vampire said with a grin. "Because you were Mr. Effin' Personality back in L.A. I mean, your popularity took a wee dip when Angelus came around, but other than that, we had to keep a bouncer minding the door to keep your priggish self from being overrun by admirers." His blue eyes sparked with laughter. "Oh, and the White House called, mate, and they said no, you're not entitled to Secret Service protection no matter how fucking great you think you are."

Booth's jaw tensed for a moment before he reminded himself that any response would play right into his grandchilde's hand. _I'm not gonna even dignify that with a response, _he told himself as he briefly rolled his eyes._ No fuckin' way._

"Third," he continued, his tone of voice even as if he hadn't heard a single word that Spike had said. "I need you to give me a head's up if you find out about anybody coming here or saying or doing anything that might mean they're trying to find me."

Spike's dark brows furrowed over his narrowed eyes and his lip curled in a slight grimace. "Okay, so those are the pretty details," the vampire agreed. "Well done," he applauded Booth. "Kudos on the mad summary skills. But the next question is...what's all that got to do with me, mate?" he asked Booth. "You've never been coy before, Angel—don't start now. What do you want _me _to do? What did _I_ do to get the ring?"

Booth rubbed his tired eyes with the heels of his hands and sighed, taking a few deep, measured breaths before speaking again."Look, most everyone else is going to leave me be if they don't know where I am," he said with a shrug. "You know, they won't come looking for me. The obvious exceptions are—"

"The Boy Wonder," Spike supplied even as Booth said, "Connor."

Booth scowled, and Spike smirked as the FBI agent sighed and continued.

"Drusilla—"

"Now wait," Spike squawked, more than a little surprised at the mention of his sire and true love. "What makes you think Dru would be more of a messy problem than she usually is?"

"Because the only thing we've ever been able to count on about Dru is her unpredictability, Spike," Booth explained. The vampire raised his brows and held his hands up as he gave his head a tiny shake to indicate he had no idea what the other man was talking about. For his part, Booth rolled his eyes, unsure whether Spike was being deliberately dense to annoy him or if the lovelorn vampire truly didn't see the issue. "Oh, come on," Booth said with an impatient edge to his voice. "You know as well as I do that one day she could wake up, finish draining off some guy from a nightclub in a leather jacket, and then think 'Oh, I wonder where Daddy is.' Then I'm totally fucked."

"Hmm..." Spike pursed his lips as he considered the additional justification of Booth's interpretation and, allowing himself a moment to linger on the mental picture of the brown-eyed beauty with the second sight, then blinked away the vision and nodded. "Fair point. Continue."

"And, of course,—" Booth said even as Spike opened his mouth so that both men said the same word at the same time.

"Buffy."

Nodding, slowly, Booth repeated, "Yeah, Buffy."

Spike was quiet for a moment, his tone of voice slightly changed when he began to speak again.

"So I take it that it didn't go over too well the last time you saw her last month?" he asked as he suddenly became fixated on a nonexistent smudge on his leather duster.

He hung back, trying not to seem too interested as he watched his grandsire out of the corner of his eye as Booth's expression shifted from a sad reticence to something tenser and more ambivalent. Rattled as she was upon her return from her second trip to D.C., Buffy didn't tell Spike much about the details of her conversation with Angel. He knew it went badly as far as she was concerned, and the fact that the normally mouthy and opinionated Slayer didn't talk much about it—never mind her reluctant and glum admission that he'd been right and she shouldn't have gone down to D.C. to begin with—in a way spoke volumes more than if she had given a word-for-word, blow-by-blow accounting of her encounter with Angel.

He was deeply curious about what had happened between Buffy and his grandsire, perhaps morbidly so, and for all of his faults, Spike guessed that of the two of the participants in that fateful conversation, it was his grandsire who would probably give a more complete and circumspect account of it. Yet a thread of distrust still ran between the vampire and his now-human former rival, making him loathe to open himself up by being too obvious or interested, and so he stared at his shoes as he waited for Booth to say something.

Booth was quiet for a minute. "Yeah," he finally said with a nod. "You might say that."

_It was early morning, and an unusually quiet one at the Hoover. Booth had stumbled into work early, bleary-eyed and exhausted after being yanked from slumber by the demanding cries of his infant daughter not once or twice, but three separate times the night before. Brennan was barely two weeks into her maternity leave from the Jeffersonian, but Booth had been pulling late-night baby duty at home because his wife had come down with a case of the flu. He had oodles of vacation days saved up, so he had gone in early with the intent to knock out some overdue paperwork, make a token appearance at Andrew Hacker's staff meeting, pull together some cold case files to look over, pick up some vegetarian phở with an extra side of sriracha sauce from the local Vietnamese bistro, and head back home to take care of his fifteen day-old daughter so that Brennan could eat her soup in peace and then get some much-needed rest. _

_Booth was staring at his computer screen, letting the long line of message subjects in his inbox make him cross-eyed for a minute, before his gaze drifted over to the new photograph of him sitting next to Brennan in her hospital room as she cradled their newborn in her arms. Stephanie had bought the silver frame for him, and he couldn't help but smile every time he looked at it. As he glanced over it this time, he grined as he remembered the afternoon two and a half weeks before—when she'd called on a day not all that different from how this one had begun—to tell him her water had broken. He also thought back to how, many hours later, after she'd finally agreed to drive straight to the hospital on her way in from Baltimore as her contractions grew closer together, she'd chastised him—just moments after her latest wave of contractions eased—for using his SUV's red and blue emergency lights and siren to induce the cars ahead of them to move to the side of the road so he could get to the hospital before she actually delivered the child. _

_Just thinking about the drive to the hospital called forth the gush of emotions he'd felt as he leaned hard on to the gas pedal, keeping one eye on the road and one on his phone as he drove. He imagined the look on her face each time he heard a minor gasp or tiny grunt through the cell phone, picturing how Brennan's face would tighten into a grimace each time a contraction overtook her. He was torn between how to feel in that moment. On one hand, he'd felt happy and excited that he would finally get to see and meet and hold the precious child he'd loved since the very second he'd first learned that Brennan was pregnant. Mixed with that was a flare of familiar frustration that he felt whenever he thought about how damn stubborn could be and how infuriating she could be sometimes just because she had to do things __her__ way. And, last, he felt a swirl of dark fear and anxiety coiling deep in his belly as he wondered whether he was going to be able to be for this child what he had never been able to be for his two sons. That anxiety seemed to fade the moment he saw his daughter emerge into the world, her eyes squeezed shut as she uttered her first warbling cry, and the fear seemed to wash away as he felt a rush of love and joy when the nurse-midwife handled the swaddled newborn to her beaming, teary-eyed mother. _

_Lost in his reverie, Booth drummed his fingers on the desk while he waited for a large email attachment to open, then stopped, opening his hand and closing it into a fist again as he remembered how Brennan had held his hand, her slender fingers curled tightly around his as she gritted her teeth and pushed with every ounce of strength she had as their daughter came into the world with a wavering, liquid cry that filled the birthing room. He glanced at his BlackBerry and grinned at the picture of Kathryn that he'd set as his phone's wallpaper, her downy mop of reddish-brown hair sticking up in all directions as she lay sleeping in her mother's arms. _

_Drawing a deep breath as he reminded himself that he would be able to return home to them in just a few hours, he glared at the glacially-slow government-issue computer as it still struggled to open the enormous attachment. He impatiently tapped his plastic ink pen on the stack of blank white note cards that he had in front of him, trying to distract himself from the fact that he missed them—his two auburn-haired beauties—and he wanted nothing more than to slam the laptop shut, shove the computer and his casefiles into his briefcase, and get back home to them. Finally, after another minute that seemed to last an eternity—which was saying something since he knew something of indeterminately long periods of time—the troublesome attachment opened and he pulled a notecard off the stack and slowly began to read off the screen. He'd just put the pen to his mouth and twisted off the plastic cap with his teeth when he heard a quiet shuffling sound in his doorway._

_Surprised that someone would interrupt him when it was obvious to everyone in the bullpen that he'd come in early to knock out a half day before heading home to his wife and newborn baby, a low growl of annoyance rattled in the back of his throat and he looked up, his eyes widening as he saw __her__ standing there._

_Buffy Summers been standing in the doorway for a few seconds, silently watching him as he sat there behind the big desk with its fake wood laminate, his eyes fixed on whatever it was that he was reading off the computer screen. A faint smile curved her lips as she let her gaze skim over the familiar features of his profile—his dark, intelligent eyes peering out from beneath the overhang of his heavy brow, the long line of his jaw with its pebbled, pockmarked skin, and the smooth olive skin of his thick neck, which seemed even stronger straining as it did against the starched collar of his shirt. In that moment, all she saw was __him__, and she tuned out everything and everyone else but __him__. She saw him fiddle with his pen, tapping it on the stack of index cards on next to the keyboard as he rolled the plastic cap between his teeth. His dark brows furrowed, and she heard him make a growling murmur of a sound in response to something he was reading before a whispered curse fell from his lips, and it was in that moment that she felt the knowledge of it all crystallize in her mind as she realized how much he had changed and yet at the same time how comfortingly familiar it all felt. _

"_Wow," she said in clearly impressed voice. "I don't think I've, uhh, ever seen you in a regular suit and tie before." _

_She paused, her memory flashing to the rather painful recollection of her prom. She'd been standing with Giles and had just told him, "Every now and then, people surprise you," when she saw her watcher's eyes swivel and focus on something in the back of the room. That's when she turned around and saw Angel, clad in a classic black tuxedo, slowly walking towards her with an uncertain but not unhappy expression on his handsome face. She remembered slow-dancing with him, and feeling his smooth, clean-shaven cheek against her forehead as his big, thick-fingered hand gently clasped hers. It was Angel who'd eventually made the move to end it between them once and more. "__You deserve more," he'd told her by way of an explanation when he explained why he was leaving Sunnydale and leaving her. "You deserve something outside of demons and darkness. You should be with someone who can take you into the light. Someone who can make love to you..." She hadn't wanted to let him go then, but eventually she'd done just that through a haze of pain and tears because, way deep down, on some level, she'd known at least part of what he'd said was true. At that time in her life, he wasn't what she'd needed, even if he was what she thought she wanted...more then anything else. Still, she'd felt a sense of deep gratitude for him when he'd shown up to keep his promise to him even as that gratitude had swirled together with a mixture of other emotions, mostly negative. She'd felt conflicted, bittersweet, and heartbroken as__ they'd danced that night, each of them knowing that it was over between them. _

_Yet somehow still, even though she knew it was only for a little while, her heartache seemed to fade as she enjoyed the feel of his hand tenderly palming her back and the scent of the menthol shaving cream that clung to his skin even as she clung to him, and to the idea of having him, knowing all the while that he wasn't hers to have and that when that night was over, they would each move on with their separate lives. _

_She blinked away the memory and she, after a fleeting moment of pause, amended her prior statement. "At least, not one that wasn't a tux. I didn't even think you'd be the type of guy who even owned one." _

_At first, the sound of her voice stunned him, and for a moment, he didn't even turn his head, sure as he was that he was hallucinating, perhaps delirious from lack of sleep. But when she spoke again, he knew this was no auditory mirage, and he slowly turned his head to find her standing there in the doorway of his office. For several long moments—minutes, it seemed to him—they simply looked at one another, their eyes locked in a gaze that made the knot in Booth's gut clench tighter and tighter with each passing second. It had been years since he'd seen her, and while he knew his being with her had caused him and Brennan immeasurable pain, in that moment seeing her face, illuminated by her piercing green eyes and framed by dusty blond hair swept back in a messy ponytail, made his skin flush with warmth even as his belly quivered with a faint flutter of fear—of what and for what reason, he wasn't really sure. The complex mix of emotions paralyzed him for a few moments before he realized what was happening and swallowed hard in an attempt to steady himself._

_So happy was she to see him, Buffy was more or less oblivious to the swirl of ambiguous emotions that washed over Booth's face. She felt a tingle crackle through her limbs at seeing his warm brown eyes again, and thought of how many nights she'd nearly drowned in those eyes as she'd kissed him. The shimmer in his gaze made her heart skip a beat as she drank in the sight of him, unable to suppress a smile as she saw for the first time his face with a shadow of stubble on it. He'd always kept clean-shaven in all the years she'd known him in Sunnydale, and even later, the couple of times she saw him after he went to L.A., and it struck her as strange to see him look this scruffy and, for the lack of a better word, __normal__._

_She leaned against the frame of his office door, her green eyes staring at him in clear appreciation. She smiled at him, her eyebrows raising up as she finally spoke, being the one to break the staring contest they seemed to have stumbled into. Her voice was soft and happy as she greeted him with a simple, "Hi, Angel."_

_The sound of the last two syllables, for a century so familiar, but which now seemed alien to him, left him a little breathless at hearing them again after so long. The last voice he'd heard utter that name was Brennan's, the last night they were together before he was severed from the life he'd lived and cleaved to a new one, and so to hear it again, after so long, not in Brennan's husky voice but in the faintly breathy voice of the young Slayer, gave him a distinctly unsettled, wary feeling._

_Booth blinked several times as he took in the sight of his one-time lover standing in the doorway of his office, chuckling to herself as she nodded at him._

"_Buffy," he said quietly, dropping his pen on the desk and yanking the tooth-marked plastic cap from his mouth. _

_He stared at her in stunned disbelief, his head spinning and his heart suddenly beginning to race as a gush of a dozen different thoughts and emotions tumbled through his head. A part of him was surprised to see her there, while a voice in the back of his head whispered, 'tsk, tsk' and reminded him that he'd known for some time that she would eventually come back, to attempt again what she'd come to D.C. a few months earlier to do: to confront him. It was only a matter of time before she'd done that, and now, finally, there she was. _

_She looked good—strong and healthy—but he found the smile on her face strangely disconcerting, and found the fact that the smile unsettled him even more unnerving. He felt odd, guilty in a way, that he was responding negatively to what appeared to be a positive emotion on her end. She'd only been standing there at his door for a minute and already he felt tangled in a confusing web of emotions too complex to even begin to pick his way out of. That, too, didn't surprise him—that when she'd finally come to see him, whenever she'd finally gotten around to making another sortie down to D.C.—her visit was going to churn up a messy wad of stuff he'd rather leave where it was, settled in a nice pile of silt that he'd quite neatly buried it in the dark recesses of his memory. He'd always known she'd eventually come back—it was merely a matter of time. So he didn't know why now that it was actually happening he was having this emotion, but there it was. With a grim, but virtually inaudible sigh, he resigned himself to having to face up to the unpleasantness once and, hopefully, for all. He held his breath, waiting for her to say something, unsure himself of how to best to begin. _

_Thankfully for him, she spared him the effort._

"_Can I come in?" she asked him. "I know that's usually your line, but_—" _She paused and then smiled at him as she corrected herself with a light chuckle as she gestured at the ray of sunlight that was spilling through Booth's office window and falling onto him. "Or, at least, I guess it used to be."_

"_Yeah," Booth said with a bit of a nod, his voice low and hesitant. "But, not for a while now."_

"_Right," she snickered as she took a couple of steps into his office. Glancing around the sunlit room, she turned to him and said, "I guess I can finally ask you to recommend a good sushi place now, huh? Or maybe a good waterproof sunscreen that won't make my skin break out? Because It's obvious you've been spending a bit more time in the sun since I saw you last." She hesitated for a moment before she then allowed herself to smile. "I didn't think I'd ever say this," she continued. "But you look good with a tan, Angel." She paused before she tilted her head to look at him intently for a moment and then confirmed, "Really good, actually." She turned and glanced out into the bullpen, which was about half-full of grunt agents still checking their emails and working through their first cups of coffee, then turned back to Booth. _

_The sight of him, healthy and strong, his skin warmer and more alive than she'd ever seen it before, made her think back to the day she first she'd seen him after he'd regained his humanity. That day, he was anything but healthy and strong: he'd been weak, bleary-eyed, and woozy after slowly emerging from the morphine-induced coma the doctors had put him in to force his mind and body to rest so that the swelling in his brain would go down and give him a fighting chance at survival. _

_Buffy remembered her fear like it was yesterday, sitting at his bedside and holding his strong, veiny hand and wondering if what the doctors had told her was true. She'd been warned, both by his nurse and by Spike, that even if Angel survived, it was possible that he could be permanently impaired—unable to remember the names of people or things, incapable of recognizing or deciphering symbols, never mind reading or writing. His spatial awareness might be compromised, leaving him unable to walk without bumping into things, and unable to feed or clothe himself. It was almost a certainty that he'd emerge with some kind of impairment. The only question was, how impaired would he be, once the swelling in his injured brain went down?_

_She'd prepared herself for what she would see, and had decided that whatever happened, she would take care of him and help him heal, to show him that she could love him, and that whatever he had to give her in return was enough. Perhaps the accident was a blessing in disguise, she'd told herself. She'd felt a chest-filling swell of hope when he'd turned to her and smiled, and not two seconds later felt that hope shatter when he whispered a single slurred syllable: "Bren." She'd had no idea who this 'Bren' was back then, but she'd known from the way he'd said it that it was someone's name—someone else's name of a certain someone else of whom she obviously knew nothing about. And that was what began to cut her the most deeply as she'd thought she'd been the only person he'd thought of and spoken of in __that__ way._

_Shrugging away the echo of pain that she'd felt at the vivid memory, as she looked at him, she found her gaze drawn where it always seemed to fall when she needed reassurance: his eyes. She looked into his gentle brown eyes and took some comfort from the warmth she found in them. Even though she was unable to jettison completely the image of him in that hospital bed, she tried to shape the memory to her will as she began to speak once more. _

"_Granted," she said, taking another couple of steps closer to Booth's desk, "the last time I saw you, you were in a hospital bed with your head wrapped up like a bad costume job in a shitty low-budget mummy movie and an IV sticking out of your arm, but, still—you look good, Angel."_

_The reference to his coma and his stay at L.A.'s Good Samaritan Hospital rattled him. He didn't remember much about the day or so after he'd first awakened from his coma. He knew that he had been gravely injured as the result of a fall from several stories not long after he'd regained his humanity, and that he'd had brain surgery to remove a dangerous blood clot. All that he knew from what Brennan had told him, but his own memories of that time were scant and the bits and pieces he __did__ remember were, at best, hazy and sketchy. _

_One thing he felt fairly certain about was that he'd had no memory of Buffy having visited him there, although he did remember a tiny snatch of a memory—a sensory fragment, and little more—of his hand closing around a woman's hand. The fingers he squeezed were soft and slender, and the nails kept well-trimmed, with no polish—the same neat and ever-practical way Brennan had always kept her nails—and he'd always assumed that the hand he'd been holding in the memory was Brennan's. That single moment, along with a dim sliver of a recollection of laying in that hospital bed, helpless, exhausted, and dazed as Spike sat in the chair next to a heart monitor and babbled on in his grating Cockney voice about his conformist wardrobe and excessive use of 'nancy boy hair gel,' were all Booth remembered of that time. He wasn't even sure why Spike had even been there. In a way, his presence seemed more like standing sentry than sitting vigil, but which notion Booth quickly dismissed because he found it hard to believe, after 120 years of rivalry, in-fighting, needling and ball-busting, why the hell his grandchilde would ever want to stand watch like a junkyard guard dog at his bedside. _

_It was strange, he thought, that until that moment he hadn't really given much thought to the memory of holding a woman's hand, and it seemed odd that it was only now, as Buffy mentioned her visiting him, that he realized that the hand had been hers, not Brennan's. He'd had a hard time rectifying the apparent fact that the calloused and rough hands of the Slayer had somehow been transformed into the comforting and soft hands that had taken care of him during his post-op recovery even as the proof seemed to say that the Slayer had, in fact, come to see him then._

"_You saw me?" he asked tentatively, his face blushing a little as if embarrassed by the fact that he didn't clearly remember her visit. "I mean, you...you were there?"_

_Buffy's brow furrowed as she stared at him, taken aback that he didn't even remember her being there. After a moment, a hard lump formed in the back of her throat as she remembered why she'd cut short her visit to Angel in his room in Good Samaritan's Neuro-ICU. The memory and the heartache she'd felt that day were as clear as if it all had happened just yesterday._

_"Bren," she remembered him saying to her in a raspy voice as his eyes fluttered open. "What are you doing here?" She'd hurried to place some ice chips on his bruised and crack lips before he'd coughed and continued in his disconcerted voice. "I'm sorry, Bren. So sorry, lass, I-I...I just...I'm tryin', but I'm sorry...just so, I...I-I..." Caught up in the memory of that time and place, her gut clenched as she recalled how Angel's voice had trailed off and how he'd narrowed his eyes and stared at her as she sat at his bedside. _

_She felt a stabbing pain in her chest as she remembered him laying there weakly and looking at her with glassy, confused eyes and quietly whispering, "Bren?" _

_A wave of gut-swirling nausea hit her as she recalled how she'd finally regained enough composure to answer him. "No, Angel," she'd told him, reaching over and touching the edge of his hospital gown, grazing his sinewy forearm as she moved. "It's __me__, Angel," she'd told him. "It's me—Buffy. Don't worry. I'm not going anywhere. I'm here now. Everything's going to be okay. I promise. Everything's going to be alright. I'm here now, and I'm not going anywhere. I swear." _

_Her heart ached at the thought of how he'd looked at her with glazed-over eyes and blinked before rolling over on the creaky gurney and with a petulant pout on his chafed, chapped lips and asking, "But where's Bren?" _

_Buffy frowned as she remembered the sick, sinking feeling that overcame her that morning all those years ago when she felt her face blanch with shock and dismay, then flush with anger that, after everything they'd been through together, he'd call for someone other than her as he'd lay there, just steps away from death's door. _

_At the time, she'd assumed that the 'Bren' he'd mentioned was some flake he met in L.A. after taking the job at Wolfram and Hart. ('Bren' even sounded to her like a trendy L.A. name.) Spike had mentioned something in passing to her about a blonde werewolf chick he'd taken to carrying on with for a bit, but the lycanthrope's name escaped her. Still, after all they'd been through, she was shocked and hurt that he wouldn't recognize her when she was sitting right next to him. But now—after his disappearance from L.A. and finally meeting the mysterious 'Bren' only to find out that she and Angel had married and were expecting a child—the whole situation made a lot more sense, even if it was more painful than her original theory. _

"_Yeah," she said, her voice all of a sudden quieter and almost hesitant. "I was."_

_Booth leaned back in his chair and scratched his stubbly chin, remembering that he hadn't shaved that morning. He looked at Buffy for a few moments, then turned away, bringing his eyes to rest on the silver-framed photo of Brennan and Kathryn next to his computer. _Both of them were there, _he thought. _Both Buffy and Bren came to see me there, and I don't remember any of it. _He frowned and started twirling his pen around, then tapping it on his desk nervously as his mind raced. _What the fuck else happened to me then that I don't remember? Who else dropped by and talked to me about God-knows-what when I wasn't with it enough to even spell my name or count to three? _It grated on him to think that there was an entire chapter of his life—a relatively significant one, at that, considering all that had happened to him as a result of his accident—that was a complete and total blank. In fact, it more than grated on him. The fact that he couldn't remember what happened to him at Good Samaritan pissed him off. He closed his eyes and drew a breath, then exhaled it slowly and with it tried to relax away some tense aggravation that the memory—or, rather, the dearth of memories—had caused him._

_Clearly his accident and coma affected more than just him. Obviously, it had so frightened Brennan that it drove her to take the most drastic action imaginable. But, as he looked at the Slayer and heard the hesitation and the sad undertone to her voice, he knew the episode had affected her, too. _

"_I'm sorry," he said with a shrug. "That whole thing's a bit hazy for me, ya know. I got my brains pretty well scrambled when I fell, and I didn't really know up from down for a little while after I first woke up. So, I'm sorry I don't remember much of what we talked about."_

_The softness in his low voice comforted her and Buffy felt some of the tension in her shoulders melt away. She smiled at him again, amused to see how, yet again, Angel had changed his style of hair and dress to suit the new lifestyle he was leading, and how he could make just about any style of dress, no matter how basic or bureaucratically drab, look good. She let that thought sort of hang in her mind as they just stood there looking at each other in an awkward, but not tense silence. After a moment, Buffy shrugged and gave him a slightly sheepish look as she shifted her weight from one hip to the other._

"_I know..." she started to say to him before her voice trailed off again. She felt a strange sense of cognitive dissonance wash over her as she looked at him. Although she'd boarded her plane the day before straight-backed and confident that returning to D.C. to see him and finally to talk with him herself was the right thing to do, now that she was actually there, as she stood there in front of his desk. she found herself awash in uncertainty, suddenly unsure of exactly what she hoped to accomplish now that she'd finally found him again. Unable to shake the feeling of strangeness, she pursed her lips for a moment and began to speak, her gaze averted as her words tumbled awkwardly from her mouth. _

"_You know," she said. "That me showing up like this_—_" She gestured at the space between them as she continued. "Outta the blue and all? I know it's sorta weird, but_—"

"_No," he said, with a quick shake of his head. "It's not, actually. I've, uhhh, kinda been expecting you." Buffy shot him a strange look, causing him to lift his eyes to meet hers. _

"_Oh?" she asked, a bit of surprise finally cropping into her voice. "Really? Because to be honest, just between you and me, I wasn't even really certain I was going to end up here today until I finally got on the plane at JFK...and even then it was touch and go until the cab from Reagan pulled up in front of the Hoover Building."_

_Booth slowly nodded again in reply. "Yeah," he told her. "To be honest, I have been. For a while now. I knew you'd come. I just wasn't sure __when__ you'd show up...only that you eventually would."_

_She stared at him for a long minute and then asked a question to which she already knew the answer. Still, she knew she had to ask it and so spoke. "Because __she__ told you?" Buffy finally managed to ask, her voice wavering a little as she made reference to Brennan. Although she tried not to show it, Booth's trained eye and intuitive knack for reading people's moods meant that, as quickly as it came and vanished again, the tiny wince Buffy made when the word 'she' passed from her lips belied her even-keeled indifference. "I should have known she would," she grumbled. There was a certain amount of bitterness and vitriol in her words that surprised even Booth, who responded with a frown. That reaction caused Buffy to quickly amend, "That is, your...wife?" She forced herself to utter the last word even as a look of pain that crossed her face as she choked it out. _

_Booth leaned back in his desk chair and sighed, then, smiling faintly as he saw the framed picture of Brennan and Kathryn in the hospital, leveled his gaze at her and answered with a silent nod. _

_As he nodded at her, Booth finally pushed his chair back and stood up, accidentally bumping the back of his desk chair against the table behind him and knocking a small plush white lamb toy off the behind him. The toy hit the floor before he could grab it, and as soon as it made contact with the ground, it began making a throbbing, warbling noise that sounded like a heartbeat. He reached down and picked up the toy and his eyes met Buffy's for a brief second before he turned the toy over and tried to figure out how to turn off the noise._

_The realization hit Buffy like an anvil as she tore her eyes from his. She was unable to help herself as she looked at the desk and filing cabinets behind him, the tops of which were covered with dozens of pastel-colored cards, a wicker basket filled with burp cloths, pacifiers and a rattle, and a trio of purple, green, and yellow stuffed animals. In the center of the desk behind him, partly obscured by his chair, was a framed photograph of him, standing next to Brennan who held a chubby-faced infant in her arms. Buffy felt her chest tighten and her stomach sink at seeing the image, which left little doubt that everything that the auburn-haired witch had told her was more or less true. _

"_Aw, jeez," he muttered, more focused in that moment on getting the toy to stop making noise than he was on the shift in Buffy's facial expression. "Where's the fuckin' off switch on this thing?" he grumbled at the 'Sleep Sheep' that was a baby-shower gift from Deputy Director Cullen and his wife. Finally, he managed to find the off button and silence the toy, then turned around and set it on the back of the cabinet where it wouldn't fall again._

_Her eyes then swiveled back to him, and she saw the sunlight from his office window glinting off the thick white gold band on his left ring finger as he placed the toy on the cabinet. She blinked and turned away slightly, looking out the window as she tried to ignore the nauseous feeling that swirled in her gut at seeing visual confirmation of what she already knew was true. _

_Booth saw the sudden shift in her expression and sighed. On some level, he felt sorry for her, because there was so much he knew that she didn't, and he doubted she ever would unless she let go of the past and learned to embrace the future as it inevitably came—on its own terms. That was one thing he could say he had learned over the century and a half since he'd met Brennan. Things came on their own time, at their own pace, and no one really ever had control of it. You just had to take things as best you could. He knew this was one lesson that Buffy_—_partially because of her very young age and partially because of her controlling personality_—_would always have a hard time learning. But he also knew that, if she __could__ learn it, like him, it would make her life a whole lot easier. _

_Still, sensing that lesson was a long time off from being learned, if it ever would be, Booth felt a familiar flare of frustration at how her stubbornness had always made both of their lives more difficult than he thought it needed to be. As his eyes glanced to the picture Buffy was staring at with the obvious resentment she felt all over her face, the frustration quickly gave away to another part of him was still angry at her for the malicious, hurtful way she'd spoken to Brennan during their confrontation a few months before. Sympathy and anger roiled around inside of him together with feelings of wistful regret, but he tried to ignore them as he turned back to answer her prior question._

"_Yeah," he finally answered with a small nod. "Bren doesn't keep things from me. She told me everything that happened between you the last time you were here."_

"_Everything?" Buffy repeated, more a question then a statement. She walked over to the window and looked down on the busy flow of traffic navigating the intersection of Pennsylvania Avenue and 10th Street below. After a minute, she turned around, put her hands on her hips and said edgily, "So that's it? That's all you have to say to me is that she told you everything?" She cocked her head to the side and pursed her lips together hard as she shot him a hard, withering glare. She rolled her eyes dramatically and sneered, "Really, Angel?" She didn't wait for an answer as she muttered under her breath, "For Christ's sake." She shook her head and gave him a critical, narrow-eyed glare. "She's really sucked the passion out of you, hasn't she?" she said, her voice growing louder as she crossed her arms with a frustrated huff. "Just chewed it right up and spit it right back out after she was done emasculating you, huh? Because that's what women like her do. They always have. I just...I-I really would've expected you to have something more to say."_

_Booth stared at her in complete disbelief as she levied her unfair and so grossly inaccurate accusations against Brennan. It took him a moment before he had a grip enough on his anger to form some type of coherent response. "What do you expect me to say, Buffy?" He snapped as his frustration spiked even as he spoke, despite his attempts to keep control on his anger. "So, what? You want me to dial this one back, call a do-over and then open up and tell you everything she said to me about it? Because if that's what going through that little head of yours, you've got another thing coming. Nuh-uh. No way that's not gonna happen. So you're gonna just have to deal with the fact that, yeah, she told me all about it, and that's all I'm gonna say."_

_Buffy glared at him in response, his apparent nonchalance merely serving to infuriate her further as she said, "Yeah, well, the __old__ Angel would've..." Her voice abruptly trailed off as she saw his eyes swivel to the area outside of his office._

_Hearing the movements in the bullpen begin to quiet in an unusual way as Buffy's voice got louder, Booth sensed that too much attention was being paid to the goings-on in his office by the bored agents of his field detail. He heard two of the agents talking and, after one of them said what he swore was his name, they begin to laugh. He saw them swivel their heads around to look into his office with sheepish looks on their faces, then quickly turn away again with barely-suppressed snickers. He could hear their chatter as a faint tittering sound and, as two of the other young agents in the bullpen glanced over at his office, he met their gazes with a stern, almost vacant stare that the pair quickly averted their eyes from as they refocused their attention on their computer keyboards. Feeling suddenly awkward and exposed, his heart began to race as he remembered the second-floor secretary who'd told him in his first year to mind himself because "the walls have ears." _

_Wanting to handle in privacy what by now he knew wouldn't be an easy conversation, he gave a small sigh and reached for his Pittsburgh Steelers coffee mug and, noting that it was only a quarter-full, tipped it back, draining its contents in a single swallow. Buffy watched him in silence as he reached over and grabbed his sunglasses, keys and cell phone, then looked at her and, in as measured a tone of voice as he could muster knowing full well that half the bullpen was listening to him, said, "Look, why don't we take a walk?"_

_This time it was Buffy's turn to nod in silent agreement._

"So," Spike prompted him, as Booth let his recitation of the exchange he'd had when the Slayer had finally come to seek him out in his office in the FBI Building lapse for a bit. It was clear he had Spike's intense interest as evidence by his grandchilde's next question "You two decided to nip out for a nice friendly amble in the park away from prying eyes, yeah?"

Booth raked his hand through his messy, spiky brown hair and winced. "Well," he replied, "I sure as fuck wasn't gonna hang around to let half the D.C. Field Office's Major Crimes Division listen in on our conversation, if that's what you mean."

Spike glanced down at his feet for a moment, wondering what would have happened if Buffy and Brennan had run into one another years earlier. He'd called them both when Angel fell and when, after emerging from his coma, his intracranial pressure readings shot up and caused him headaches, vomiting, double-vision and increased slurring of his speech, all signs that his healing brain was swelling again. Buffy and Brennan arrived at the hospital within hours of one another, but whether due to luck or some kind of mystical providence, the Slayer had left Good Samaritan forty-five minutes before Brennan's taxi had pulled up.

_Thank the effin' lucky stars that those two didn't meet then, _he thought, still a little unsure if he would have been able to run interference well enough to keep the two from crossing paths if they'd actually both shown up at the same time. _All hell would've broken loose if they had, and I don't know how I would've let the chips fall if I was the one who had to ref that Celebrity Deathmatch. Talk about a no-win bloody scenario. Egads._

He blinked away the memory and looked up again with a thoughtful expression. "'Cause you know it was gonna get messy."

Rubbing his tired eyes, Booth sighed and said, "Well, yeah," he agreed. "With Buffy, it usually does...and I don't think I'm letting any cats out of any bags by telling you that not only can it...it did."

* * *

**-tbc-**

* * *

**A/N2: **We know that we didn't _quite_ make good on our full promise for the Buffy vs. Booth confrontation at long last. But we hope we wet your whistles, so to speak. More is coming, we promise. Part III is all written and edited, so we should be posting that sooner rather then later. In the mean time, we'd love hear what everyone's responses are. The people who've taken the time to review thus far, we appreciate it more then we can say. And for those of you who are lurking...come on. Don't be afraid to step out into the light and let your voices be known. We look forward to hearing from you all!~


	3. Pt 3: Making Agreements & Settling Debts

**Hand to Hand**

**By:** dharmamonkey & Lesera128

**Rated: **M

**Disclaimer: **Here we posit our normal rigmarole. No, we don't own anything from _Bones _or _Angel... _or anything else. Yes, we're wreaking what havoc we can with these characters that we don't own to create an awesome story. But, since it's only for the purposes of creative enjoyment and amusing distraction, we think we're okay. Are there any other questions? No? ::blinks:: Good. Then, moving on―

**Summary: **Please see Part I.

**Logistical Notes: **Please see Part I.

**A/N: **We'll make this short and sweet. Want to find out how Booth finally dealt with Buffy? Then, we've got just the chapter for you. Read on!

**UNF Alert: **Ditto. As we've said in previous parts, we're sad to say that the alert is not yet necessary. We know what you want. We do. Not that all of you are reading this just for some epic UNFness that only the likes of dharmasera can provide. But we like to think our track record speaks for itself. So, as always, just be patient. Wait for it. It's coming. We promise. That patience will be amply rewarded when the time is right. We haven't let you down yet, have we?

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**Part III: Making Agreements & Settling Debts**

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Spike stared at Booth's simple proclamation about the Slayer's behavior and how it was no great surprise that (as, from the vampire's standpoint, she _always _did) she acted so predictably where Angel was concerned, and Spike found that he was once again agreeing with his grandsire. Shaking his head, but still wanting to hear the rest of the story, he tried to clarify that her conversation with Booth had been something he'd never really be in support of no matter what it seemed like.

"You know, mate," Spike said with a small sigh, "I swear. I really did tell the pet to take a pass and let things be. I knew no good would come of it if she went back down there. But she wouldn't listen. She was hell-bent to see you, even though I told her again that being as hard-headed as you were, if you'd'a wanted to see her, you'd'a bounced your priggish self up to New York to drop in on her. But she wouldn't hear a bit of it. I couldn't tell her the sky was blue and have her believe me after she'd made up her mind, and I'd told her that I didn't think it was a good idea no matter what her reasons were for wanting to do what she'd set her beautifully stubborn self on doing."

Booth nodded mutely and crossed his arms in front of his chest. "I know," he said soberly. "A part of me wishes she hadn't come back, but another part of me felt like, well, she'd already kinda opened up Pandora's Box coming down here the first time and getting Bren all cranked up to hell and back, and that if it took her coming back here one more time to talk to me herself to get her head straight once and for all about the way things are now, well, then it was sorta a necessary evil, you know? It was a cross I had to bear."

Amused at hearing his now-human grandsire make reference to a symbol which, if it had physically touched him in any way, would've seared his skin, Spike laughed and added, "So to speak."

"Right," Booth grumbled as he remembered walking out of his office and into the bullpen with Buffy at his side and shooting dagger-like stares at the young agents he supervised, giving them a silent warning not to even think about saying a word to him. He grunted out a quiet laugh as he thought how, at least at first, he felt a wave of relief at feeling the Hoover doors close behind them as they made their way down Constitution Avenue, past the Vietnam Veteran's Memorial and onto the National Mall.

_The pair eventually found themselves walking slowly amid the hustle and bustle of the sidewalks that separated the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument along the sides of the Reflecting Pool. It was still fairly early in the morning, but the heat of the August day promised to be stifling once more if afternoon rain showers didn't bring the city a modicum of relief._

_After they reached the National Mall, for a few minutes, the two of them walked in an uneasy silence, occasionally turning their heads and making eye contact for a second or two before looking away again. Buffy found herself listening to the sound of his footsteps as the wood soles and heels of his wingtip loafers clacked and scraped against the concrete pavement. After a while, aggravated by the silence that she knew Angel would be all too happy to let linger between them, she knew she needed to speak, if only to break up the heavy silence that had begun to weigh on her like a lodestone. As she turned and watched him walk, and saw in his smooth, long-legged, almost cat-like gait the same man she met so many years before, she finally had something with which she could use to break the ice as she began to speak._

_"It's weird," she said quietly, still getting used to the sight of him with his close-cropped hair and the faint shadow of stubble that dusted his cheeks. Not waiting for him to reply, she observed, "I can't remember the last time you and I were together, when neither of us was bruised and bloody, or about to become bruised and bloody, and didn't have to rush to talk about something other than an impending apocalypse, obscure prophecy, or someone who needed saving." _

"_Yeah," he said, a certain distance in his voice as he thought about the years they spent together, or at least in the vicinity of one another. The faraway tone in his speech faded and an easy grin broke across his face as he thought about their relationship and the odd conditions under which it developed. "We did a lot of fighting, you and I," he said. Suddenly, the grin melted away and his tone became serious again. "We were still fighting the same fight, even when we weren't playing on the same team..."_

_She watched him for a moment as she remembered the argument they had when he came to her apartment to tell her how he'd accepted the job at Wolfram & Hart, and how even after their respective anger had faded, the exchange left them both with a bitterness that time couldn't wash away. She saw him just a couple of months later when he again came up to Sunnydale from Los Angeles, but that time—each of them still bitter after their last interaction—their meeting had consisted of little more than a brief exchange when, facing armageddon on the eve of the collapse of the Hellmouth in Sunnydale, she'd declined his offer to fight alongside her and told him to return to L.A. to open a second front there. Another large chunk of time passed before she'd found out from Spike that Angel had been badly injured in a three-story fall during a fight with some Ry'Car'm demons, she'd gotten to Los Angeles as quickly as she could. _

_Although Spike had been more than a bit vague on the details when they'd spoken, he'd said that the doctor had told him Angel had suffered a setback and, while he hadn't said as much, she knew—both from the tone of his voice and his recommendation that she hop the next available flight from Leonardo da Vinci Airport in Rome to LAX—that Angel was in a very grave condition and might not survive the night. She knew she needed to go to him. Angel needed her, perhaps even more then she'd come to realize that she needed him. It was time to go home—to finally return to the States from her post-Hellmouth European exile. She just hoped that she wasn't so stupid that, once again, their timing was off and she'd missed their chance once and for all if he __really__ died by the time she arrived back in California._

_Fortunately, fate seemed to be on their side...for once. They'd appeared to finally have gotten a bit of luck in the fact that, by the time her international flight landed in Los Angeles, she'd retrieved her luggage, and cleared customs, a call to Spike's cell phone had let her know that Angel was still alive. When she arrived at the hospital not long after and saw him laying there with his eyes still a little swollen and puffy from the post-surgical inflammatory response, his mouth gaping open as he snored, her own eyes began to fill with tears. Then, after a moment or two—miraculously, almost as if he'd heard her soft sobs—he woke up from his doze, his eyes fluttering open as he squinted and struggled to see with a gaze that was glassy and indistinct. It was almost like he'd come out of things just for her. _

_Her heart had ached to see him that way. A maelstrom of emotions had descended upon her as she was flooded with relief flooded since she knew, although he had a long way to go, since he'd woken up, she knew he would be okay. She knew that he'd make it. She knew that they'd make it. That knowledge had allowed her to still feeling sad, but even more so, angry—angry at him for being arrogant enough to think that he was smart enough to handle himself fighting his foolish war-from-within against the Senior Partners of Wolfram & Hart, angry at herself for not trying harder to talk him out of it and perhaps saving him from this fate, and angry at both of them for leaving things so badly between them the last few times they'd talked—and as she felt that anger well up inside of herself, she felt a swirl of nausea well up in her belly. _

_She hated herself for feeling bitter and angry when she should have felt sympathetic and loving, and so their last meeting, too, brief as it was, had been poisoned with negativity. How many times had she wondered whether, knowing what she did now, would she have been as abrasive and cold as she was that night he came to tell her about the Wolfram & Hart job? Would it have made any difference? Although it galled her to admit it, she wondered if she had done the wrong thing, doing as she did that night. _

_Buffy thought of saying something about it, but as she opened her mouth, she found herself at a loss for how to even begin to broach any of these subjects even though she knew one of them would have to find a way to do so if they were ever to have any serious chance of moving forward, let alone moving forward together. But, in that moment, she felt more or less lost, so she abruptly closed her mouth and remained quiet. And so the pair just continued to walk, neither speaking though both of them felt the awkward tension that hung in the air between them._

_The sun's bright rays shone down on the pair, and as Buffy felt the warmth on her scalp, she couldn't help but smile again and shake her head. Finally tiring of the monotony of watching her own two feet hit the scarred greyish pavement, she turned and glanced at him. He walked with determined, if somewhat slow and deliberate steps, almost as if he were aware that his stride was longer than hers by several inches and wanted to make sure he didn't walk too fast for her. She saw that his cheeks had begun to flush a little as tiny beads of sweat dotted his forehead, his temples and the back of his neck, dampening the sharp edge of the razor-cut hairline on the back and sides of his head. As he walked, a droplet of sweat shook loose from his sideburn and dribbled down the edge of his jaw before disappearing beneath the starched collar of his dress shirt. The whole notion of him sweating in the heat of a sunny summer day struck her as completely bizarre. At last, she knew that someone had to say something and that her latest observation was as good an opportunity as any. Taking a breath, she silently wished herself good luck, opened her mouth, and spoke. _

"_I don't know if I'll ever get used to this," she said finally. "I know this is going to sound pretty funny coming from a girl like me, but this may be too hinky even for me."_

_Still walking beside her, staring at a random point on the opposite side of the Reflecting Pond, it took Booth a minute to look back over at her, as he was clearly lost in his own thoughts. "Hmmm?" he asked._

_Buffy gestured at him. "This," she repeated. "You gotta admit. It's sorta...weird."_

"_What?" Booth asked, confusion cutting deep creases across his forehead as he puzzled over her remark. "D.C.?"_

_She considered his response, a bit surprised that he had not understood her straight off as she'd expected. Pushing aside the disappointment she felt at the realization, she thought about his question and then shrugged. "Well, yeah," she nodded. "That, too, I guess. But, what I actually meant was walking next to you in the sunlight. It's sorta...weird." _

_She stopped, Booth stopping in response when she did, and she was able to look at him for the first time, up close and without any restrictions. Taking a deep breath, she inhaled his scent and was surprised as it mixed with the daylight sights and sounds. In a way, it was the same familiar musky smell of his sweat that she'd grown accustomed to in the years they spent patrolling together, slaying demons together, and—except for the night of her seventeenth birthday, when she lost her virginity to him in the only night of true passion they ever shared—loving one another in an agonizingly celibate affair. She knew his smell as well as she knew anyone's. _

_But yet, familiar as she was with the way he smelled, there was something different. She could tell from the stubble on his face that he hadn't shaved that morning, and the fragrance left behind by the previous day's shave had long since evaporated away. There was another scent, spicy and slightly woody, that struck her as vaguely familiar, but which she didn't immediately recognize. It smelled almost like incense. After a few seconds, the thought of incense triggered her memory, and she realized what it was: sandalwood. She remembered being at Willow's place when the witch burned a small cone of incense with that fragrance. In all the time she'd known him, she'd never smelled sandalwood on him. But once she recognized it, there was no doubt—he was using something with sandalwood in it. She liked how it made him smell, and the way it mixed with the smell of his sweat, but yet it felt alien. The man she knew—the man she'd loved—never, ever smelled of sandalwood, but rather only of the menthol shaving cream he used each evening before meeting her. But now, he didn't shave every day, but whatever his morning routine was, it now involved using something with sandalwood in it. That single scent unsettled her, and made her wonder how much he had changed when even the most basic thing about him—the way he smelled—had changed. _

_Her brows furrowed and she blinked away the errant thought and instead focused her attention on the way his olive skin had flushed in the heat and watched him reach up and wipe his brow with the heel of his hand. _

_She shook her head and said, "No, strike that. It's definitely weird." Gathering more confidence, she added, "More than weird." She paused for a beat as she struggled to find a better word. "Strange," she finally settled on and then shook her head as she quickly amended, "No, uber strange." Rolling the adjective around in her head, she smiled as she realized she was at last satisfied with her choice of descriptors. Tilting her head to look at him, she chuckled as she saw Booth staring at her with an odd look on __his__ face, as she added, "Which, I think, is kinda saying something since I'm a girl like me telling that to a guy like you."_

_Booth looked at her, his brown eyes narrowed as he tried to figure out what she was thinking, and as he did so, he realized that at some point, he'd lost the ability to read her. All he could do was shrug his shoulders slightly in agreement as he replied, "You kinda get used to it after awhile, I guess." He thought about all the changes he'd endured over the years, especially over the last five or six—finally coming to a place of comfort and peace with Brennan, then regaining his humanity, then losing it all, including Brennan, when she made a bargain with The One that saved his life but took that life from him and gave him a new one. "You can get used to just about anything after awhile," he said vaguely._

_Buffy puzzled at the remark, studying him for a minute. "I don't know about that," she said. "Some things..." She let her voice trail off for a beat before she spoke again, her voice stronger as she continued. "__Some__ things, sometimes, are just too far out there to get used to." She nodded at him and clarified at his confused expression, "For example, you being human now, that I might be able to get used to...after a time, you know? At some point? Sure..." Buffy then gestured at his outfit as she continued, "But, then there's all this other stuff...new name, new you...new suit? I mean, you in a suit and tie?" She paused again and then shook her head as she smiled at him, bolstered somewhat by his pleasant mood. "Nope. You going all respectable on me is definitely something I don't know if I can get my head around."_

_A smile finally cracked Booth's face as he chuckled and said, "Hey, you act as if you're surprised I clean up so well."_

"_Well," she chuckled. "Considering the fact that this is the first time I think I've ever seen you with less than four times the recommended amount of hair gel in your hair, like I said, it's a bit of a change to process. So, yeah."_

_Unable to help himself at her words, his smile quickly faded into an annoyed frown as he said, "What is it with people always wanting to make cracks about my hair?"_

"_Come on, Angel," she laughed. "It's a damn good thing for you that you stayed out of the punk-rock club on the other side of Sunnydale. I think the leather, spikes. and chains crew would've tried to kick your ass for single-handedly cornering the market on styling gel and driving up the cost of their mohawks and liberty spikes four-fold." She became silent for a moment, then smirked and added, "I'm surprised you never tried to use your gelled-up spiky hair as a weapon. Because I think, if you had, it'd have been one less thing to carry out on a patrol, you know, since it's not like we wouldn't have needed the extra blades that weighed us down from time to time."_

_Grumbling, Booth retorted, "Yeah, well, it wasn't like I could see myself in a mirror when I was styling it. So, ya know, if someone had actually told me, I might've known I was going a bit overboard and cut back on the styling product overkill."_

"_The instructions say use a 'dime-sized' amount," Buffy said with a straight face. "Would you've listened to any of us if we recommended cutting the gel usage from a silver dollar to maybe a fifty-cent piece?"_

_Booth's lips twisted into a slightly more pronounced glower as he considered her point, remembering how strange it was to finally see his face in the mirror again after two hundred years of having to shave each day by touch alone. After a minute, he shrugged and smirked, then said, "I probably would've told whoever who was making fun of me to fuck off."_

"_So, see?" she laughed with a shake of her head. "What good would it done if I'd said anything? It's not like you would've listened anyway."_

"_Yeah, well," Booth pouted. "I like to think that I do a lot of things better now, thanks very much." He paused and then said, "You know, it's not like I'm in this monkey suit all the time." He lifted his gaze to meet hers and held it as he emphasized his point with a sharp shake of his head. "Really," he insisted. "I'm not. It's just when I'm on duty." _

_Flipping up the cuffs of his shirt-sleeves as he looked down at his brightly-shined black wingtips—which he wore that day to look a bit spiffier than his usual lest Cullen, Hacker, or any of the guys in the bullpen think he wasn't 100% focused on his work despite the excitement and change at home—it occurred to him that, compared to what Buffy had been used to seeing, he had changed. _

"_Buff," he said, "I know the threads have changed, and my hair's changed, and..." He made a fist with his left hand even as he kept it concealed in his pocket, then loosened the fist as he ran his thumb across the underside of his wedding band. "Look," he said as he reached up and scratched his stubbly jaw. "I'm really the same guy I always was, you know. New job, new name, new town...but deep down, I'm still the same guy you knew before when we met back in Sunnydale. I'm still that guy."_

_She looked straight back at him as she quickly asked, "Working as a federal law enforcement agent?" The disbelief she obviously felt when she'd discovered that fact still evident in her voice as she spoke. "Seriously?"_

_Booth's brows furrowed as he frowned, unsure as to whether to take the remark as an insult. His annoyed expression softened as his eye caught a young woman passing by pushing a jogging stroller, and he thought about getting that kind of a stroller for Kathryn so that he could take his daughter out for a run while the weather in D.C. was still pleasant. He reached up and raked his hand through his hair, then nodded. "I like it, Buff," he said. "You know—I'm good at it. Actually, I'm __really__ good at it, and I like it." _

"_Really?" she asked, her eyes wide with genuine curiosity. The passion which she heard in his response made her alter her approach a bit. "Because..."_

_Again, when her voice trailed off, Booth felt another flare of annoyance, causing him to grumble as he prompted her, "What?"_

_Buffy shrugged and then said simply, "I mean it just seems weird, Mr. I-live-in-the-shadows suddenly up and deciding to go all hella establishment. Don't you think so?"_

_Booth grinned and scratched the back of his head. "I'm better at it—you know, at doing my job here catching scumbags and locking 'em away so they won't ever hurt anyone else ever again—than I ever was as a demon-nabber back when we were together." He spoke with a vague waver to his voice that left the Slayer wondering whether his reminiscence was nostalgia or just an old memory. "Ya know, patrolling Sunnydale's cemeteries and the alleys behind the bars on the scuzzier side of town made some difference, I guess, but sometimes I felt like the little Dutch boy. Dust one vamp or waste one demon and then, __blam__, another ten were already behind 'em ready to take their place. But here, in my work with the Bureau?" He paused as he waited until his brown eyes firmly met hers so he could emphasize the truthfulness of his words. "Here? Well, here, I __know__ I'm making a difference. I yank these assholes off the street, and when I do that, I bring closure to a victim's family. Yeah, it's completely different than what I did back in Sunnydale. Sure, I can admit that. But it doesn't mean I'm not just as good at it, if not better. I mean, back then, seemed like my biggest worries were making sure I knew how much time I had until dawn and that I had enough sharp stakes." He laughed quietly, pausing as he reflected on a memory that he didn't verbalize, and then shook his head. "It's kinda funny to think about that now..."_

_At first as he'd spoken, a part of Buffy had felt a bit indignant when she thought he was belittling the work they'd done together and the work she still did. But as he laughed, she couldn't help but feel her ire melt away because it had been so long since she'd seen him happy enough to laugh and smile like he was now. In turn, Buffy couldn't help herself as a smile spread across her own face as she remembered the numerous nights, in the fall after she first began slaying, when he joined her on patrol and how they'd found themselves, as often as not, spending more of the night gazing into one another's eyes than they ever did into the dark night where vampires and other spawn of the Hellmouth waited. She reached up and touched her lips as she remembered the way he'd kissed her, his lips hungrily grasping at hers as she could taste him—and the animal blood he'd drank for supper that night—each time his tongue swept into her mouth. She felt a wave of light-headedness wash over her as she remembered how he'd kissed her the night she gave herself to him, and in the moment of ecstasy he took in her, the fetters that had held the evil in him at bay for nearly a hundred years suddenly snapped, unleashing the lethal rage of Angelus. _

"_You know," she began. "Now that I think about it, I'm not sure how much patrolling and slaying we got accomplished a lot of times," she said, her green eyes twinkling back at him as she smiled coyly at the memory. _

_Booth knew by her smile and the flush in her cheeks that she was thinking about the way they used to be, and an old thought flickered to the forefront of his mind as he once again wondered what __she__ thought they'd been to one another...both then and now. At last, knowing that the matter would have to be settled one way or another, if for nothing else than Brennan's peace of mind, he answered in a way that he hoped would open the door for them to have the discussion that he knew they needed to have—even if it wasn't going to be easy for either one of them._

"_Yeah," he said, his voice somewhat hollow and distant as he surveyed her oval face with its delicate features. He knew that he had to tell her the truth, to finally come clean with her about what they had and what they were, and in so doing, what they'd never been and would never, ever be, but he was not sure how to go about it. He paused again, his eyes following the jogging mom as she disappeared into the distance, and he thought about Brennan, and how despite all the changes he'd endured since Halloween last, he'd felt genuinely content. Grabbing on to Brennan as the life preserver that she'd always been to him, Booth knew he had his answer. He turned back to the Slayer and spoke the simple truth as he said, "I'm happy here, Buff. In a way I never thought I ever could be."_

_Buffy heard something in his voice, a softness to it almost, that she hadn't heard in a very long time and hadn't, were she to be honest with herself, actually expected to hear. Although there was still something odd about his tone and the way his shoulders seemed to slump a little, but she figured he was just tired, so she shrugged it off. A smile curved her lips as she stopped walking and stared at Booth for a minute. As soon as he heard her footfalls cease, he stopped walking as well and turned on his heel, giving her a quizzical look as he shoved his hands in his pants pockets. _

"_What?" he asked, stepping towards her and squaring his hips to face her as her silence started to make him feel a bit nervous._

"_Well," Buffy responded, a hesitation in her voice as she spoke. "It's just that I don't think in all the time I've ever know you that you've ever called me by a nickname unless, you know.." She paused as she gave him a look and then added, "Unless you were Angelus..."_

_Booth's eyes narrowed briefly, his jaw tensing for a fraction of a second after hearing the old name of his soulless self. He drew a sharp breath as he caught himself recoiling at the name, then he closed his eyes for a second and opened them again, smiling at her and raising his hands as if proclaiming his innocence. "Hey_—_human now, remember?" he said. "In no danger of losing the good ol' soul. No demons here, okay? We're all good, I promise." _

_He looked away from her for a minute, careful to keep the smile he'd pasted on his face there as he tried to settle himself, focusing for a moment on the simple movement of his diaphragm and on the rhythm of his breath. Although he tried not to show it, hearing his old name—the name he wished he could forget along with the memories of all the atrocities he'd committed in the time he raged under that name—stung him, and he winced slightly as the syllables echoed in his mind. Indeed, the only memories he could look back on from that time with any fondness were those of the nights he spent with Brennan, in her bed and in her company, in the waning years of the Victorian age. He looked away for a few seconds, trying in that brief moment to flush his thoughts of the memories that old name brought to mind, and instead trying to focus his thoughts on the life he had now with Brennan, his longtime love, and the newborn child they made together in love. After a couple of seconds of reflection, he looked up at the Slayer, forcing the faint smile he'd put on his face to stay there. _

_Buffy stared at him for a moment and then said, "Right...it's still weird, though, you gotta admit, right, Angel?"_

_He shrugged sheepishly. "I'm sorry," he replied, glad to again have something to think about other than the century and a half he spent as a soulless monster. "I didn't mean to, you know," he stammered, as he vaguely gestured with his hands. "That is, well, it's a habit I guess I picked up somewhere. I don't know when I started to do it, but I shorten people's names all the time. It's a habit, I guess. I won't do it again, promise. It was just a slip_—"

"_It's alright," Buffy waved him off as she stopped walking again and looked at him with a critical eye. After a second, she couldn't help herself as she shook her head and leveled her green eyes to meet his brown ones. "It's just that...well, you __have__ changed, haven't you?"_

_Recovering a little after hearing her reassurance, Booth relaxed as he took an odd sort of comfort from her observation, even though he'd claimed to have not changed all __that__ much just minutes earlier. "Yeah," he said with a nod, his warm brown eyes gazing back at her with a soft yet serious expression. "I guess I have. I'm not the same guy I was, all those years ago."_

_She held his gaze for an intense moment and then spoke. "You've changed a lot, actually," Buffy repeated. She hesitated for a beat before she dared to bring up again what—or, who rather—she was suspecting to have been such a cause for such changes in the vampire she'd known and once loved so dearly. "That woman..." Booth's eyes darkened and his jaw hardened instantly at hearing Brennan referred to as 'that woman' in a tone of voice dripping with venom and disdain. "Brennan," Buffy continued, ignoring the tenseness that she saw in Booth's jaw and the flicker of anger in his smoldering gaze. "I think she said that's what her name was, right? The bitchy one with the uber wicked blue mojo punch?" She stared at Booth expectantly, waiting for a response. When none was forthcoming, she added more for herself then for Booth's benefit, "Which she managed to use to knock me on my ass, by the way, which isn't an easy thing for most people to do even if they do manage to catch me off-guard like she did."_

_Booth's jaw tensed for the second time in as many minutes as he heard the Slayer refer to his wife and the mother of his child as a 'bitch', but he felt a murmur in his chest as he remembered what Brennan had told him once about how being called a bitch was a badge of honor. The murmur of Brennan's voice inside of him reassured him, and his hard jaw softened as a smirk curved his lips._

"_Yeah," he said with a smile, unable to resist taking a certain pleasure in knowing that the woman he'd loved for so long had bested the Slayer. "Bones...well, normally, she's pretty good about keeping that stuff under control." His eyes narrowed as he continued. "Usually, she's actually pretty benign...unless someone touches her. She doesn't like to be touched by strangers." Booth looked at Buffy, his eyes still narrowed as he struggled to read her expression, which seemed deliberately blank as if the Slayer were trying to hide her feelings from him. Shaking his head, he recalled watching Brennan slug a federal judge and, on another occasion, clobber a Salvadoran gang-banger and lay him flat, right in front of the elevator at the Hoover. "You should see her left hook," he said. "It's a mean jab."_

"_Figures," Buffy grunted as she remembered how the unexpected ball of blue energy had suddenly shot out of Brennan's hands and had knocked her off her feet so that she landed flat on her back three feet away. "Not that I really have any interest in finding out seeing as how she laid me out the last time. Thanks. but no thanks." She paused as she reflected on the rather unexpected and embarrassing end to the conversation that she'd had with the pregnant woman on her last trip to D.C. a few months before. Thinking aloud, she told Booth, "When I told Willow how she managed to use whatever little whammy she'd saved up to knock me on my ass so hard that I had the wind knocked out of me, she was pretty impressed." Standing quietly for a moment, Buffy's voice had softened a bit and she asked, "Bones, huh?"_

_Booth couldn't help but smile as he nodded. "Like I said, I'm kinda into the nickname thing these days."_

"_God help us if you and Spike are ever in the same place at the same time again," she replied instantly with a shake of her blonde head. "No one will have any idea who in the hell either one of you is talking about."_

_Booth frowned slightly as he considered the prospect of reuniting with his grandchilde. _

_"I don't think you'll need to worry about that," he grumbled, then fell silent again as he waited to see what the Slayer would say. The frown on his face deepened as she began to speak again and it became apparent that much of the humor that had brightened the edge of her speech had leached out of her voice._

"_She wasn't lying, was she?" Buffy asked, tilting her head and raising her chin questioningly. Even though she hadn't specified in what context she was referencing Brennan, both of them knew what she meant and so the Slayer wasn't surprised when Booth answered in kind._

"_No," he said with a simple shake of his head, knowing exactly what she meant even though the question seemed to be vague. "She wasn't."_

_For once, the pain that had glimmered in Buffy's eyes clearly reemerged, and she didn't even bother to hide it as she spoke with a voice thick with emotion. "I know you're wondering...why I'm here, you know? After the last time I came, and she told me all that stuff...and was pretty convincing about it, too, right?"_

_Booth's jaw shifted forward as he felt a rumbling murmur in his chest. "Bren doesn't mince words, and she doesn't lie," he said flatly. "She never has in all the time I've known her, which is a pretty damn long time, and I don't think she ever will. She's just not that type of person. So she may not always volunteer everything she knows, but she doesn't lie. So that being said, I don't know all of what she told you, but I'm know as sure as I know the back of my own damn hand that she doesn't pull her punches. So whatever it was that she told you, you can pretty much take to the bank."_

_Buffy was quiet for a minute. Her eyes began to glimmer with moisture and she coughed to clear her throat, then finally spoke again. "I needed to see for myself," she said. "You know? What she told me? I needed to see if it was true."_

"_I know," Booth said, a certain sadness darkening his voice as he watched the woman he once cared for deeply slowly resign herself to the reality of what she saw as their changed circumstances. It troubled him to see her in unnecessary pain—albeit pain that was in large part self-inflicted because Buffy had never faced up to the fact that she couldn't control everything around her, no matter how much she wished and desperately wanted to believe that she could. He wondered if it would be a lesson she ever learned, and even as he had that thought, somehow he doubted that she would. Feeling a bit regretful at that realization, since he knew she'd never really be able to grow up and truly move on until she realized that, he took a deep breath. Then, he wondered if there was any way to let her off easy and say what needed to be said without making her feel any worse than she already did. After a few moments of consideration, he figured he'd make one more try at letting her down easy before he'd have to break the glass and, using whatever means necessary, extinguish Buffy's long-smoldering hope that they would someday be together. _

"_I've known since the day she told me she saw you," he told her, trying to be as gentle as possible, but also feeling a need to be crystal clear so there was no doubt in Buffy's mind about where they stood with one another once she left D.C. "It's like I said earlier. Ever since Bren told me what happened, I knew you'd be coming around. Because that's just how you are when it comes to these kinda things. It was just a matter of time. I've been expecting you ever since she came home and told me you'd found her here on the Mall. I knew you'd show up. I just wasn't sure __when__ it was finally going to happen."_

_Buffy looked him up and down from head to toe as he spoke, then brought her eyes back up to meet his and saw his brown eyes brighten the second he mentioned Brennan. _

"_I...I-I...just...wow," she gulped, her green eyes glistening as they skimmed the features of his face—his heavy brow and high cheekbones, and the faint shadow of beard covering his strong jaw, which puzzled her, since he'd always taken care to shave every day when she knew him in Sunnydale. "Wow..." she repeated before nodding. "And now? Not only are you __not__ in trouble...but, Spike was right, wasn't he?"_

"_He did, huh?" Booth huffed, his eyebrows knitting low over his eyes as the notion of his grandchilde gossiping about him behind his back..to __Buffy__ of all people...well, it made his teeth clench. "So, what did he tell you?" he grunted out through gritted teeth. "Tell me, Buffy. What did Spike say?"_

"_He said that it was foolish for me to come looking for you," Buffy explained. "That if you hadn't been found by now, it was probably because you didn't want to be found, and that if I went looking for you, I probably wouldn't like what I discovered if and when I found you." She stopped and let out a long slow breath as her eyes looked away from him to skim the surface of the Reflecting Pool. "And, well...he was right."_

_Booth took a deep, rasping breath and shrugged, his brow creased as he tried to tamp down his frustration and clear his mind well enough to find the right words. He frowned and leaned his arm against the back of one of the plastic-coated metal chairs on the edge of the seating area adjacent to the coffee cart where he and his partner had spent so much time over the years. The proprietor, Terry, was making his usual small-talk with his sole customer who, by the sound of the conversation, was, like Booth and Brennan, a regular who'd caught the tail end of the last trickling stream of the morning rush to get his pre-work caffeine fix. Taking an odd measure of comfort in hearing Terry's familiar voice chattering away behind him, Booth took another deep breath and tried once again to explain what had happened in as gentle a way possible._

"_Look, Buffy, I...it's just—"_

"_No," Buffy said, quickly turning back to face him, and cutting him off with a sharp shake of her head. "Don't. You don't need to explain, Angel. I was..." She stopped and swallowed heavily as she struggled to retain control of her emotions. After another moment, she tried to speak again as she said, "Wow, you'd think I would've learned this lesson the first time."_

_She didn't need to ask him if he remembered when she came to Los Angeles under the pretext of looking for Faith Lehane, after the Slayer from Boston had gone 'rogue' on a suicidal crime spree to get herself killed because she believed herself to be evil and beyond redemption. Buffy thought back to that night—one of the most painful she'd ever had in her life—when she'd stood in the police precinct with Angel, and finally realized that what they'd had was really over. _

"_What goes around comes around, huh?" Buffy sighed, looking at him with an expression that made Booth worry because he recognized it as one that signaled the Slayer delaying confronting something she didn't like because it was beyond her control by doing the one thing she did best—lashing out. His fears were confirmed when he heard a sharp edge to her voice as she added, "Karma's a bitch, I guess."_

"_Buffy, please," Booth sighed, his voice rising in pitch as his patience began to fray. "Don't...we don't need to do this."_

"_No," she told him with a sharp edge in her voice as she averted her gaze from his. "We __do__, Angel. Because...I know it now." She twisted her head, her cheeks reddening a bit as she looked back to him, her face taking on a hard look as she nodded at him. "I recognize it. I do. I see that look in your eyes every time I've mentioned her, and I know it for what it is. The only problem is, you've only had that look when you've talked about her...not me." _

_Buffy felt a hard knot forming in her throat, and she did her best to will it away. It was then that she glanced around and suddenly realized that she was standing more or less in the same spot she was when she had her ill-fated confrontation with Brennan. "God, this sucks. Of course it would happen here." She stopped as she clinched her hands into tight fists against her sides. "I hate this damn place," she muttered under her breath, not caring in that moment whether Booth had heard her or not. She wondered if the coffee cart was some kind of mini-Hellmouth, except instead of spilling forth the spawn of demonkind, it was a mystical site where she could come to get her ass handed to her and feel like a jackass of cosmic proportions. "I really, __really__ hate it."_

_Booth had, in fact, heard her muttering to herself, and that was when he finally made the connection. He knew that his wife's run-in with the Slayer happened after she'd left the lab to take a short walk to get a cup of tea at the coffee cart, but it wasn't until that very moment that he realized that the run-in had, in fact, taken place at the coffee cart—__their__ coffee cart, as the two had come to think of it._

_He glanced over at Terry, who acknowledged him with a smile and a soft jerk of his chin, and thought of saying something about what had happened between Buffy and Brennan that day, but again the soft murmur of her voice in the back of his mind caused him to hold his tongue. Instead, he watched as the expression on Buffy's seemed to shift from frustration to sadness back to frustration again, even as she held her silence. Tempted as he was to say something, Booth heeded the counsel of his inner voice and held his silence. _

_After another minute, Buffy feigned a smile as she nodded at him and with more than a bit of bitterness in her voice asked, "Who would've thunk it, huh? I guess Xander was right when he said you were a one-woman vampire...err, well, human." She stopped, thought about what she'd just said, grimaced, then looked up at him as she said, "You know what I mean."_

"_Yeah," he replied quietly, resisting the impulse to roll his eyes at the mention of Buffy's longtime friend and former high school classmate. _

_There had never any love lost between Xander and Angel when he'd been a vampire. Xander had always regarded him with more than just a little suspicion and, Booth guessed, jealousy. Booth couldn't remember many times that the young man—the only one of Buffy's close friends who had not gifted with supernatural abilities—had ever spoken to him without the sharp edge of disdain in his choice. It was obvious that Xander had had a crush on Buffy for a very long time, and he'd viewed Angel as a dangerous, unstable, untrustworthy rival for her affections. For his part, Booth had never really liked him, finding the youth shallow, narrow-minded, and incapable of being serious when the circumstances called for it. Yet, once in a while, Xander was capable of moments of insight and, Booth supposed, this had been one of them. "I do, that is...yeah. I mean, yeah...he was right."_

_As Booth expected, Buffy's body language reflected a sharp shift in her demeanor as she went on the offensive. "So, is this the part where you say that it's different than what we had?" she asked him, her voice edged with clear resentment. "That it's different because she knows you and trusts you...and you know and trust her?"_

"_I'd be lying if I told you otherwise," Booth said swiftly, prepared for her attempts to bait him. Still hopeful he could defuse it, he tried again to calm her down. "But, look," he said. "I don't want to hurt you, Buffy. There's no point to me saying something that will just make you feel bad...especially when we both already know the truth."_

_At this, Buffy couldn't help but give him a small, dark chuckle. She bit her lip before she looked up at him, and she said, "There you go again. Always taking the high road and making the rest of us look bad, huh?"_

"_Buffy_—"_ he said softly, holding her eyes as he gave a minute shake of his head. "That's not what..." He saw her body language tense further, and he tried to modify his approach when he realized his original wording wasn't getting the response from her that he'd hoped. "Look, Buffy, I_—_"_

_At the sound of her name, Buffy shook her head more furiously than she had to that point in time as she spoke to him. "Don't," she repeated, her voice extremely sharp as she cut him off. "Just don't, okay? You don't need to say it, Angel. I know. I do. It's just that...well, you know...I, ummm...I just always thought it would be __me__," she said, her voice suddenly soft as her eyes watered once again despite her resolution not to let him see her tears. "After all that we've been through together, I was sure that we'd someday have our chance, you know, a time for __us__—"_

_Whether it was the lingering sting of her repeated betrayals, or the emotionally manipulative nature of her hypocrisy, her words_—_however softly spoken or emotionally true for her they were_—_caused Booth to erupt with a roar of anger._

"_Really, Buffy?" he suddenly snapped, his question punctuated by a growl that rattled in the back of his throat. "If you really believed in the mystical power of our love and that we were always destined for one another, why did you turn around and hop in the sack with Spike?" His upper lip curled back as he spat his grandchilde's name. "Hmm? Were you thinking about the cosmic significance of our relationship when you were screwing him?" he asked, the volume of his voice dropping as he realized they were standing in earshot of the coffee cart. "How did that work, exactly, huh?" He grunted out a bitter laugh. "You're gonna have to explain that one to me, because it's not quite makin' sense for me here."_

_Buffy's nostrils flared as her cheeks flushed at his words. "You've got a lot of nerve, Angel," she snapped. "You were the one who apparently had someone on the side the whole time we were together, and __you're__ the one who's giving __me__ shit?"_

_"What are you talking about?" he growled as he narrowed his eyes at her. "Are you saying I—"_

"_Don't play dumb," she snapped, cutting him off mid-sentence. "You know __exactly__ who I'm talking about. Your little witchy bitch friend, hmm?" Her green eyes glimmered with indignation. "That's to say nothing of all the times you had a few other lags in your devotion to me."_

_Booth scowled again as he grunted, "What the fuck are you talking about, Buffy?"_

_Her eyes widening as she spoke, Buffy snickered a bit as she said, "You think I didn't know about them? About your blast-from-the-past hookups with Darla? And Cordy of all people?" She felt bile rise in her throat as she looked away, shaking her head furiously. "I know you're not __that__ dumb so I can't believe you fell for her bouncy, flaky cheerleader routine." She made a face as she turned to look back at him, her gaze hard as she spoke. "I mean, really, Angel," she said, the accusation in her voice clear. "Really? Cordy? You let your standards get that low so that by the time you were trolling at Wolfram & Hart you were even messing around with that werewolf chick that Spike mentioned you rolled around in the hay with for a while?" She shook her entire body in a disgusted shiver as she muttered, "Seriously, I mean, just...ewww..."_

_Booth's temple pulsed as he glared at her, his jaw clenched and his nostrils flared in rising anger. His face, already a little flushed by the heat of the sun cresting above them, reddened even more as the murmur of moderation in the back of his mind was drowned out by the roar of blood in his ears. _

"_Oh, riiight," Booth said, shaking his head as he scanned her face, his eyes narrowed critically. "So, okay, is that what we're doing now, huh? Because if you want to talk about your list of greatest hits, I'm game." He cracked his knuckles as he nodded at her. "You want to talk about Bren and Darla and Cordy and Nina? Because you know what? I don't really feel like talking about them. I think I'd rather talk about some of your one-hit wonders—you know, like Riley? What a fucking douche-bag he was." Booth grunted with utter disdain at the thought of the young soldier who was recruited into the government's secret Initiative research and covert ops program. Riley had met Buffy while posing as a fellow student at UC Sunnydale, and her on again/off again relationship with the white-bread, fall-in-line, uncreative, shallow government agent had seemed to be a patent rejection of everything Buffy claimed to adore in Angel. Booth shook his head as tried to he let go of a long, puzzling sense of indignation about Buffy's past romances that had seemed to include everyone __but__ him. _

"_Of course, I could go on and on and on about Spike, but let's mix it up, hmmm? Here's a fun one...how about The Immortal? I mean, what the hell was __that__ about? I mean, you wanna talk about blasts-from-the-past? That guy has gotten more play than the Bee Gees did on 70s radio. So, you should give some serious thought about getting tested, Buff, because that nasty sack of shit's been rolling around for centuries." Booth grunted out a disgusted laugh, taking a small bit of pleasure in seeing the shocked and almost shameful look that crossed Buffy's face when he mentioned the mysterious centuries-old vampire who had been a thorn in Spike's and Angelus' sides since well before the turn of the century. In fact, her response merely encouraged him to continue. "I mean, look—is this what you really wanna do? Talk about other people we've each been with? Gimme a goddamn break, Buffy." He rolled his eyes and waved his hand dismissively as he turned his back and began to walk away from the coffee cart, his jaw shifting tensely from one side to the other as he felt his anger rippling through him. _

_For a minute, Buffy didn't move, but just stared at the back of his tall, broad-shouldered figure as he stood a few feet away and looked at the Lincoln Memorial in the distance, loosening his tie and rolling up his shirtsleeves as the summer sun climbed towards midday. _

_Booth put his hands on his hips and shook his head, then turned around to face her again. Knowing that he was the one who was going to have to be the adult, he tried to get his anger under control before speaking again. Eventually, he broke the growing silence between them as he tried to relax his body language and soften his tone. _

"_Look, I didn't come here to fight," he sighed. "Alright?"_

_Seemingly in response to his tone, Buffy nodded to herself and walked over to where he stood. "I didn't either," she admitted. For a few seconds, she just stared at him with a pinched, pained look on her face, then she closed her eyes and sighed. "I'm sorry," she said. "I mean, it's just...well, I guess I just thought, at some point, that what we had would be enough to get us through until we could find a time and place and a way to be together and suddenly finding out that it's not is kinda of a lot to deal with, Angel." _

_"But," he immediately countered. "Come on, Buffy. This...us...all of it? It's not really a sudden thing," he said quietly. "Things between us changed a long time ago. You know that...it's just...now?" He hesitated for a beat, then sighed and said, "It's just __now__ that you're all of a sudden willing to see what's been there in front of you for a long time."_

_She watched as he turned away again, and followed his gaze to the monument behind them, with its broad staircase leading up to the massive fluted Doric columns in front. She let her gaze skim along the line of his jaw, briefly remembering the way his pebbled skin felt against her lips when they made love the night of her seventeenth birthday. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath as she tried to jettison the memory of being with him on the one perfect night they had together._

"_You know, I'd always thought we'd have our time, our moment," she said with a sad, wistful sigh. "But, I was wrong, wasn't I? Because...you moved on. You have someone now, and you love her. You've got a great new life, and it doesn't include me. Not anymore. So, I need to just go home, because there's no point. There's no chance for us, is there? I mean, maybe, I could see if you hadn't_—_but you did. You...you married her, didn't you?"_

_Booth turned to face her once more, his gaze meeting hers with a firm, if somewhat undecipherable look in his warm brown eyes. "Yes," he answered simply, rolling his thick white gold wedding band around with his thumb. "I did."_

"_And, now...the baby she was carrying?" Buffy blinked at him, deciding that if she was in for a penny, she was in for a pound. She suspected she already knew what the answers to her questions were, but she desperately needed to hear the answers from him. "I mean, when I saw her, it was obvious she wasn't just having a bad day with too much water retention. She was pregnant."_

"_Yeah," he said, his voice even as he held his jaw rigid. "She was."_

"_Is it...is it yours?" Buffy asked, her voice cracking even as she asked the question, remembering the clutter of baby-themed gifts she saw arrayed behind him in his office, but hoping against hope that maybe she was wrong. Clinging to a slim thread of hope that the reason he was with Brennan might not be because he loved the witch more than he'd cared for her, she asked, "Is that why...why you married her?"_

"_No," he answered quickly, unable to maintain his deadpan manner any longer at hearing Buffy suggest that his and Brennan's marriage was one of mere convenience. "I mean, yeah, the baby's mine. But, no, we got married before she was pregnant."_

"_Ohhh..." Buffy said, her face suddenly falling again even as she realized the significance of his words. She blinked and looked away, the color draining from her cheeks as she stared at her feet. A wave of light-headedness washed over her and she wobbled a bit on her feet as her heart started to race and her mind began to sputter. Buffy shook her head and wiggled her heel against the pavement in a nervous, impatient way. "Then, that means...it really __is__ over for us, isn't it? Spike was right...and I really just need to go home." She stopped, and then lifted her green eyes to meet his, shining brightly with unshed tears. "Right?" she sighed._

_Booth was reluctant to answer her question because, despite how angry she had made him just moments earlier, he didn't want to hurt her. He licked his lips then slowly nodded his head and replied, "Yeah." _

_Then, deciding that this had gone on long enough, and worried that if he wasn't careful things might turn more angry and more nasty than they already had, Booth tried to end the conversation by giving her the final closure that he knew she would, at some point, need to truly move on, just as he finally had when their angry confrontation at her apartment after he accepted the job at Wolfram & Hart had made it clear that they had little left between them—not even friendship, despite how much either one of them had hoped (and pretended when he'd gone back to Sunnydale to visit her before her actions with Spike had helped close the Hellmouth there) otherwise. _

"_Look, Buffy..._"

"_No," she said, quickly waving him off. "It's okay, alright? I'm okay. I-I just, uhhh..." She paused, tilted her green eyes to look up at him and said, "I just never thought we'd run out of time, you know? I always thought...you and me...I thought, one day, we'd find the time. I never thought that was something there wouldn't be enough of. I never thought we'd be working against a clock. So, that's why...well, you remember, don't you? The cookies? When they were done baking?"_

_Booth nodded soberly, but said nothing in response. In not saying anything, Buffy knew, his silence spoke volumes more than any words he could ever utter._

"_Okay..." Buffy said, quickly bringing up the back of her hand to wipe away the tears that had started to trickle down her face. "So, well...I guess that doesn't matter, now, huh? God, how embarrassing is this?" _

_She stopped, shaking her head as she looked down at her feet again, and then her body language stiffened when she recalled what Brennan had told her in this very spot. She let out a hiss as she snapped her head up to look at him. _

"_She was right, wasn't she?" She didn't bother to wait for a response, or even to see if Booth knew who she was talking about, before she continued with a deluge of words that tumbled from her mouth. "You don't like cookies anymore," she said bitterly. "She said that, you know. She said that you like pie now instead, and I should've believed her, because...you __are__ a one woman type of guy. I just, well_..._I just never thought I'd not be that woman."_

_His forehead creased as he watched her expression suddenly shift from one of wistfulness to something sharper, a look he instantly recognized as a thin veneer of acceptance underneath which simmered anger and resentment. "Look, Buffy, I'm not trying to hurt you," he said, his voice low and measured. "But, it's done. I know that, and I hope, now, you do, too. That's just the way it is." _

_She propped her hands firmly on her hips and gritted her teeth, shaking her head as she regarded him critically. "That's just the way it is," she said with a sharp edge to her voice, making it clear as she repeated his words that she was obviously mocking him. "God, Angel. I'm not a child," she told him, her voice becoming shrill as she spoke. "I know you think you're all wise and Obi-Wan Kenobi-like because you've been around for 250-plus years. But, you know what? I may've been born at night, Angel, but I wasn't born last night." Buffy shook her head again and she felt a swell of anger ripple through her limbs as she watched a happy young couple holding hands walk past the coffee cart and towards the Lincoln Memorial. Bringing her gaze back to meet Booth's pitch-dark eyes, she chewed the inside of her lip as she tried to tamp down the rising tide of conflicting emotions she felt roiling inside of her before she continued to speak. "So just so we're clear, is what you're saying is that what we had...and all those things you said to me back then...they weren't real?" she asked, her mouth hanging slightly agape as she tried to make sense of it all. "So, back then, when you said you loved me, you were lying, is that it?"_

_Booth's eyes fell and he stared at his feet, grinding his heel against the concrete as if snuffing out a cigarette on the pavement. "No," he said. "I didn't lie. I __don't__ lie. You know that."_

"_Then, what exactly are you saying here, Angel?" Buffy spat at him. "Because I gotta admit, like usual, it seems like you're sending me some mixed messages. So, for once in our relationship, could you please just be straight with me, huh?"_

_Booth pursed his lips as he looked at her and sighed, refusing to rise to her bait. Trying again, he tried to explain, "What I'm saying is..." _

_A part of him, the part of him that wanted to shove her away and flush her out of his life forever, wanted to tell her that the simple fact was that Brennan was everything to him and had been for a long, long time, since well before Buffy's great-grandparents had even been born. Another part of him, however, the part that thought of their time together with a certain sentimental fondness (tainted as it was with regret for the hurt it had caused Brennan), hated to see her in such pain. Realizing he was in a no-win scenario, Booth threaded his fingers through his hair with a sigh. _

_"Look, you want me to be straight from you?" he asked. "Okay, I can do that. Here it is...plain and simple." He took a breath and then said confidently, "It's over, Buffy. What happened between us, back then? It's finished. There's no point going over all of this again if it's not going to give you closure to let you move on like I did. So, grinding through it all serves no purpose. What happened before between us? None of it...it doesn't matter. It's in the past. Done. Finished. Finito. Over." He placed a significant amount of emphasis on the last word as he stared back at her to see what her response would be to his declaration._

_Her face flushed a deep red as her slender brows furrowed deeply over her shimmering green eyes. The delicate features of her face seemed to harden as the last vestige of her patience and civility suddenly fractured. Booth watched as the rage bubbled over, and he knew that, as he'd expected, his attempt to let her down gently had failed, not for lack of trying on his part but on account of her own stubbornness. Her eyes flashed bright with anger as she shook her head slowly, her jaw shifting slightly as she kneaded her bottom lip between her teeth. The moment he saw her nibble at the inside of her lip, he knew that 'Hurricane Buffy' was about to make landfall and, in those few short seconds between his awareness of the inevitable and that painful inevitability coming to pass, he could do little more than mutter a silent 'fuck' under his breath and brace himself for the coming shitstorm. _

_"It doesn't matter?" she said sullenly, an angry, mocking edge returning to her words as she spoke. "Is that right, Angel? Did it ever matter? Did I ever matter?" When no verbal response was forthcoming, she prodded him. "Goddamn it, Angel, tell me. Did I?"_

_"Buffy," Booth grunted, closing his eyes and shaking his head. "It's...just leave it alone, okay?" He lifted a pleading look to her eyes. "For just once in your damn life, for __your__ own good, please...just listen to someone, huh?"_

"_Why should I listen to you, Angel?" she snapped, her voice rising in pitch and volume. "That's how I got myself all messed up to begin with, listening to you and all of your charming mindfuck bullshit to begin with, wasn't it? 'Is there a problem, ma'am?' you said to me with that shit-eating grin of yours. 'Don't worry,' you said. 'I don't bite.' Remember?" She paused for only the shortest of beats before she shook her head in exasperation and continued on without letting him get a word in edgewise. "Well, I should have realized a long damn time ago that your bite is the least dangerous thing about you. You know, it's funny, but I should've listened to you the first time we met. That might've been the last time you ever really told me the truth."_

"_What are you talking about, Buffy?" Booth said with a growl, remembering as clear as day the night he first met her face-to-face in an alley on the bad side of Sunnydale._

_The Slayer rolled her eyes. "You know, I asked you who you were, and you spun me that good ol' line about being 'a friend.' Then I told you I didn't want a friend. And then—well, then you turned around with a crooked grin on your face and told me, 'I didn't say I was yours.' And you know what? All these years later, after all of it? I guess you were right all along. Perfect proof that you should always go with your first instinct, huh? Because I was right. You never were a friend. At least, you were never a friend to me."_

"_Now that's not fair," he snapped. "That's not fair, Buffy, and you know it. I came to Sunnydale to help you. To be your ally. To be a friend when you needed it most. To stand by your side when all hell literally broke loose there. And I did it, too. We both know it. I know things didn't end well between us, but you're deluding yourself if you think I wasn't there for you. So you can take this revisionist history crap that you're peddling and stuff it, okay?"_

"_As if," she grunted disdainfully. "I'm not falling for that bullshit again. I'm not falling for it anymore, so just so that we're clear, save your breath, now that you have it because I'm done listening to you, Angel."_

"_Fuck, Buffy!" Booth growled, feel the last tenuous thread of his remaining patience fray. "Don't make me do this, huh? Because the only one who's gonna come out of this hurt is you. I don't want to make this any harder on you than it already is, but you're not—"_

_"Oh," she said, cutting him off. "See? There you go again, taking the moral high ground. Well, you know what? You're a day late and a dollar short on that, Angel. After all these years of jerking me around and playing games, __now__ you finally decide to try and do what's best for me? Please." She shook her head petulantly as she muttered. "If you ever really cared about me, I should've heard __long__ before now that there was someone else. But no—all that time I thought you were mine, you really weren't because you belonged to someone else..."_

_Booth's eyes narrowed. "I never misled you," he said. "I meant it when I told you I loved you." _

_He let the statement hang in the air between them, and the longer the silence endured, the more punctuated his words seemed. The past tense of the word 'loved'—the finality of it—echoed in Buffy's ears as she looked into his eyes, searching for a flicker, however dim, of the warmth she used to find there. _

"_You know," she said with a hard, albeit ragged edge to her voice. "One thing I don't understand—if she was always so damn important to you, and so much a part of your past, then why did I never even find out she existed until Spike made a random off-hand comment about her? And why didn't I learn about the kind of relationship you had with her until I heard it from the horse's mouth—right back there..." She jerked her head in the direction of the coffee cart behind them. "If she's all that and a bag of chips, Angel, and she was your soulmate and all that happy horseshit, how come you never, ever mentioned her to me? If you loved her that much..."_

_Booth looked down at his feet, grinding his jaw back and forth as he thought about what a mess he'd managed to make of things after he went to Sunnydale. "Buffy," he said. "Like I said, this __isn't__ a good idea. There's no point to this. You're only going to feel worse when it's done. More importantly, I really don't wanna to rehash history with you. There's just no point to it." It galled him to think about how badly his relationship with Brennan had deteriorated in the months before he went to California, and the last thing he wanted to do was revisit the details of that painful time with Buffy and open up old wounds. He swallowed and said, "But if you don't take away anything else from our conversation besides this, you should know that I didn't lie to you, Buff, when I told you I loved you. I __did__ love you. For what it's worth? Back then? In Sunnydale? When I was with you, I was really with you. I __did__ love you."_

_"But?" she prompted him, her lower lip quivering slightly as she waited for the other shoe to drop. When he didn't say anything she pushed forward. "You never loved me as much as you loved..." She stopped and shook her head as she purposely corrected her verb tense. "You never loved me as much as you __still__ love her, did you?"_

_His eyebrows sank low over his dark, deep-set eyes and he looked up at her from beneath the heavy mantle that made his gaze seem all that more unforgiving. He didn't want to do it, and he'd tried his best to avoid doing it since she'd walked into his office, but as her question hung in the heavy between, he realized finally, at long last, he had no other choice. It was a do or die situation, and Booth was going to be damned if he was going to fall on his grenade for this one._

_He couldn't count the number of times he'd heard military commanders from the Somme to Somalia offer up the old adage, 'The best defense is a good offense,' but like most old adages, it rang true. He knew what he had to do. Like cauterizing an ugly, bleeding, open wound, the only way to end the hemorrhaging was to sear the wound, bloody and open and weeping as it was, completely closed so that a rough scar could begin to form and allow the healing process to proceed. With Buffy, he saw no other way than that and resolved himself to doing what he knew he had to do. Booth swallowed, his Adam's apple dipping low in his throat as he looked her straight in the eye, then nodded—more to firm up his own resolve than anything—and finally spoke. _

_"No." The simplicity of his one-word answer took the Slayer somewhat by surprise as her eyes widened. "I've never loved anyone the way I love Bren...not even you."_

_She stood there and looked back at him blankly, and for several long moments, the only sign that she'd heard him was a pair of fluttering blinks and a sudden paling of her face. Buffy opened her mouth as if to speak, but at first no words came out, and she looked almost as if the wind had been knocked out of her. After a moment, she drew a breath and looked into Booth's eyes, and in the soft warmth of their deep brown depths, she knew that what he said about Brennan—and the way he felt about her—was genuine. The knowledge of it cut her deeply, and in her pain she found the energy to lash out again._

"_So what are you really saying here, Angel?" she asked breathlessly. "That all the time you were in Sunnydale, __all__ that time...what? You really loved someone else? But you weren't with her why exactly? Because she'd kicked you out of her bed and so then you rolled into town to..." Her slender eyebrows knit in frustrated confusion. "I sure don't know the fuck why. Damn it. Tell me! What was it exactly?"_

_Booth frowned, looked away and drew a deep breath as he tried to vent some of his mounting frustration. "God, Buffy," he roared. "Why do you have to be like this? That's not how it was. Never. It's not—"_

_"Answer me, dammit!" she snapped, her green eyes welling with more tears. "What? Was I was some kind of temporary loaner that you decided to take around for a few laps while you were waiting for your real ride to get out of the shop?"_

_Booth's jaw hardened and his nostrils flared as the long-simmering well of frustration and rage began to erupt from deep in his gut. He bit the inside of his lip between his teeth so hard he drew blood, but didn't know it because it was masked by the taste of the bile that had risen in the back of his throat. _

_"What's the story, Angel?" she relentlessly pressed him again. "Was I some kind of consolation prize? Is that it? Or were you sick of being bitch-slapped and pussy-whipped by her that you couldn't take it anymore and you decided to slum around with a high school girl to get away from the Ice Queen herself?"_

_Booth's face flushed so deeply his ears turned red, his jaw tightened, his temples pulsed and his nostrils flared, giving him the look of a mad bull pawing the ground before charging the matador. To hear the woman he loved—whom he'd loved so deeply and for so long that he felt her suffering as if it were his own, and barbs slung her way cut him as deeply as they cut her, if not more so—insulted and his love of her disparaged filled him with a rage that rippled through his limbs as he listened to Buffy's rant. _

"_Tell me, Angel," Buffy demanded insidiously. "Was that it? Or did you finally realize that if you didn't skedaddle out to Sunnydale she was gonna finally put those balls of yours on a shelf next to her jars of pickled pig fetuses and fossilized dinosaur eggs?"_

_Booth glanced over his shoulder, his eyes narrowing slightly as he gauged whether a young couple passing by was sufficiently out of earshot before he turned around and leveled a dark, burning stare at the Slayer. _

_"What do you want me to tell you, Buffy, huh?" he asked her, stepping towards her even as his voice grew louder until, though he stood just a foot away from her, he was nearly shouting. Unable to do much else to channel the physical manifestation of his anger as it consumed his body and mind, Booth clenched his hands into tight fists that tightened the sinews of his forearms as the veins bulged beneath his skin. He felt the anger burning inside of him and knew he could hold back no longer._

_"Do you want me to tell you that I've loved this woman, my wife, since before the turn of the century?" he asked, his words no longer tempered with even the thinnest veneer of gentleness. "Do you want me to tell you that she and I have been lovers since before the Civil War? That I consider the five years she and I spent living together in Chicago during the Roaring 20s some of the happiest years of my life? To say nothing of the many, many other times we were together since before your grandparents were walking and talking on their own two feet—everywhere from London and Jakarta to the jungles in the Yúcatan? All over the world, really. That she's so much a part of me that I can feel her soul resonating inside of me, even when we're five thousand miles apart? That I endured a century in hell for her—a hundred years of the worst, most painful physical torture you can imagine not to mention constant, nonstop mindfucking to the point I couldn't even remember my own name—all so I could protect her soul from The One...the dark lord of hell who wanted nothing more than to have her soul to add to his own power and would stop at anything to have it?"_

_Buffy's eyes narrowed then widened again as she realized the significance of what he'd just said. She sent him to hell, and upon his return found him crouched in the dark, bound in chains and incapable of uttering more than a throaty growl or guttural roar. Even though he'd flinched from her touch and roared ferociously when she'd come to him, she'd devoted her time and her heart to nursing him back to health and reason. _

_Now to actually hear from him, years later, that the reason he had come back from hell feral, wild, fearful and vicious was because he'd spent a century there enduring physical, emotional, psychic and spiritual torture to protect the soul of another woman—a woman who he was so closely bound to that somehow The One could possess her soul by possessing him—left her gutted. She might've given him a helping hand in sending him on his way there, but it seemed like she didn't bear as much responsibility as she'd once thought in the horrors he'd suffered. The guilt she'd carried over the years because of that incident in their relationship had always gnawed at her. Besides how she felt about him, that guilt had been the main reason why she'd taken care of him and helped him (in a sense, loving him the only way she could given the Gypsy curse) only to discover that all of it, his suffering and hers, was on account of what he'd done for another woman. Why didn't he go back to that other woman, Brennan, for whose benefit he endured a century of suffering? Buffy didn't know, but couldn't shake the feeling that she'd been used all over again. _

_She gritted her teeth, her pale pink lips pursed into a tight, thin line as she muttered, "I can't believe you." She shook her head. "I can't believe you used me like that, Angel. How could you, you selfish bastard?"_

"_I didn't_—_" Booth growled in response. As Buffy's eyes shot up to meet his in an accusatory stare, he left the statement unfinished as it was his turn to shake his head. "Fuck, Buffy," he told her. "Fine. You want to say I used you, fine. But if you want the whole truth then, here it is. The whole damn truth. Because you're right. As bad as that one hundred years was, I'd do it all over again in a heartbeat if it meant keeping her safe, okay?" he pressed her in turn. "That there's nothing, __nothing__ at all, in this world or the next or the hundreds of thousands that might come in between, that I wouldn't do for her? Because of her? Is that what you want to hear, Buffy? Is it?" _

_Buffy just folded her arms across her chest and stared at him, shifting her jaw back and forth as she gnashed her teeth. She stood there with a petulant pout on her lips and glared, but still, she said nothing. _

"_Because if that's what you need to hear," Booth nodded. "I can do that. No problem." He pointed at her with his index finger, not giving her a chance to even answer as he steamrolled forward. "You want details? Fine. I can give 'em to ya. You want me to tell you what she is to me? I can do that, too Easily. You want me to tell you how much I love her? I'll do it. Forever and always. Because that's what Bren is to me—got it?" _

_Buffy blinked, loosening another round of tears that dribbled down her cheeks as she stared back at him, her mouth slowly opening and closing though she uttered not a single sound. Booth shook his head, his lower jaw sliding forward as he knew he had to do this, as hurtful as it might be, to leave no doubt in the Slayer's mind that he was Brennan's, and always had been._

_"The bottom line, Buffy, is that Temperance Brennan has been a part of my life—hell, the center of my __entire__ world—for over a hundred and fifty years." He paused for a beat, then added, "And that...that ain't ever gonna change...but, if..." He hesitated as he shuddered at a thought that had galled him for decades, but even more since he'd regained his memories and he and Brennan had married the previous fall. Swallowing once, he hoped some of the thickness in his voice wasn't too revealing as he coughed to cover his response before speaking. "God forbid," he said. "God forbid if I ever lost her, because if I ever did, you might as well kill me now because my life won't be worth living without her. Nothing and no one could ever take her place and be for me what she is." _

_Buffy stood there and stared at him numbly, still as stone with her mouth hanging open as she tried to will away the sudden feeling that she was going to throw up. As the last of Booth's words fell from his lips, she felt as if a trapdoor had opened up beneath her and, for a minute, everything around her seemed to spin as she felt herself in a free fall. She looked away and gazed across the long, sparkling surface of the Reflecting Pool, anchoring her focus there as the shock slowly sublimated into angry disbelief before she finally managed to speak._

_"If that's true, why didn't you __ever__ tell me about her?" she huffed. "If she was that fucking important to you, why didn't I hear anything about her, not even once, until Spike mentioned something about her when I told him I was coming down here to find you?" She took a threatening step towards him as she growled loudly, "Tell me, Angel."_

_Booth glowered at her, or rather through her, his face taking on a rigid distance as a protective wall rose up inside of him. For several seconds he simply stared, the only sign of emotion being the subtle flaring of his nostrils as he tried to dissolve his anger amid a stream of steady breaths._

_After a moment, he drew one last steadying breath and spoke."We'd had a falling out," he said vaguely. "When I came to Sunnydale, I wasn't sure Bren and I had a future."_

_Buffy arched her brow and grunted in mock triumph at not only having her suspicions finally confirmed, a smug if somewhat wry grin curving the corners of her lips as she seethed, because she'd known she'd been right all along. "So I really __was__ a consolation prize," she said bitterly. "Wasn't I?"_

"_Buffy," he said, his voice cracking a bit, wanting nothing more in that moment then the painful conversation to be over, for both of their sakes. For some reason that he couldn't quite put his finger on, the longer he spent in the Slayer's presence, the more he wanted to go home to his wife and daughter. "Please..."_

"_Enough," she muttered as shook her head again. She paused for a beat and lifted her red-rimmed eyes to meet his imploring brown ones. "Don't pretend you care about me," she said. "Not now. Not after everything you've just said. Just...don't...unless you can tell me that I'm wrong about any of this. That...that you aren't happy and don't want to stay here...with her?"_

_Booth stared at her for a long moment and then shrugged. "I'm sorry," he said. "I can't, because it's not true. I love her. I've loved her for a long, long time. She's my wife and the mother of my child. She's my soulmate. She makes me happy. I'm happy here, in this life I have now. I wouldn't trade it, any of it, for all the tea in China. I love it...and I love __her__."_

"_I really fucking hate this, okay?" she said in a low voice, her lip curling up in a grimace as her hard green eyes drilled into him for a few long, intense seconds before she suddenly sighed and looked away again, her body language showing that a bit of fight had gone out of her as she hunched her shoulders and seemed to slightly deflate in front of him. Unable to look him in the eye as she began to speak again, her words coming haltingly as she felt his gaze weighing on her. "Because I only want what's best for you, Angel. That's the only reason I came. To make certain that you were alright. That you were happy. Even if it really feels like a really, __really__ boneheaded idea right now. I feel so damn stupid right now, it's not even funny." She swallowed once as she looked down at her feet. "You really have no fucking clue how stupid I feel, Angel, but I can tell you...however stupid you've ever felt? Take it, multiply it by about a thousand, and maybe you'll __start__ to get an idea of how dumb I feel about all of this."_

"_You shouldn't," he said in what he hoped was a soothing way. There was something in her posture as she stood before him, her eyes averted as she spoke, her words coming in wavering, awkward clumps, that seemed to dissolve some of his anger and tug at his natural protective instincts. "Really. You shouldn't. I-I...look, okay? I don't want to hurt you, Buffy. But, I meant what I said. I'm happy. Happier than I ever thought I could be."_

"_With her," Buffy whispered, a wince crossing her face even before Booth nodded and answered her question, which came this time more as a statement than a question, signaling that, at long last, the Slayer had apparently come to understand the situation for what it was._

_Slowly, Booth nodded in the affirmative but, just to make certain there was no confusion, he felt the need to add a clarification. "Yeah," he said. "With her. She's everything to me, Buffy. Everything. And she always will be." _

_He watched her tear-rimmed eyes glimmer at hearing his words. For a minute, he was pretty sure she was going to start out and out bawling, a prospect he dreaded since, after finishing his own angry rant, the last thing in the world he wanted to deal with was a sad, weepy young woman wailing loudly in front of Terry's coffee cart. _

_Buffy wiped the tears from her eyes with the back of her hand and stared at him for a few seconds, her slender jaw hard and tense as her green eyes studied him. Standing there, surrounded by the enduring stone monuments that served as stark, unmoving symbols of the city and the new life he had built there, she found herself struck by a sharp pang of sadness at the inescapable realization that, no matter what else was said between them that warm summer day, this meeting would end just as their last encounter had—with her turning and walking away in silence with the knowledge that he wasn't hers and that no amount of wishing would change the fact that his heart belonged to someone else. _

"_I can't believe it," she muttered, turning away and letting her gaze fall on the long rectangular Reflecting Pool that stretched between the Lincoln Memorial behind them to the Washington Monument on the other end. _

_She looked at the American flags—fifty of them, she presumed—that encircled its base. Kneading the inside of her lip between her teeth as she watched the flags gently sway in the breeze, she suddenly felt very strange, alien almost, surrounded as she was by so many cold, forbidding monuments and symbols of national pride as she stood next to a man she always considered timeless and unbounded by the constraints of place or country. He'd always seemed to be a man apart, never quite feeling at home wherever he was, and this brooding quality of his, the mystery of it and the edgy darkness that hung about him, was one of the things that first attracted her to him. Now, she wasn't sure whether that man—the brooding, alienated hero who could care less about getting credit—still existed._

"_It's like one of those movies where they peel back the canvas from a cheesy family portrait only to find a priceless Picasso behind it," she said, her back still turned as she spoke, seemingly to the Reflecting Pool itself. "It'd been there all along, but nobody knew it." She fell silent, and drew a deep breath, then whirled around to face him again. "Except for me," she said sharply, "this time? It's like the opposite. I peel away what I thought was a beautiful thing, only to find it wasn't real at all, and behind it was something I completely don't recognize."_

_Booth frowned and sighed. "That's not fair, Buffy," he groused._

"_Isn't it?" she snapped back. "I should've seen it coming, you know. The warning signs were all there, that night you came to my place to tell me you'd taken the job with Wolfram & Hart. Probably even before that, actually—I mean, if there was any question in my mind that you and I were done, kaput, that dust-up we had at the police station after Faith turned herself in should've tipped me off." She rolled her eyes and snorted. "I mean, that should've been a big-ass red flag, but...well, it was when you came over that night to tell me you'd decided to take the Wolfram & Hart gig and cross over to the dark side—"_

"_That's not what it was and you know it," Booth interjected, punctuating his words with a grunt. "After spending all that time fighting the way I had—the way __we__ had—I finally had an opportunity to infiltrate the house of evil, to chip away at it from the inside. You know that. We talked about it. You were just pissed that..." His voice trailed off as he shook his head and propped his hands on his hips. "I don't even know. I think you were just pissed that I'd managed to accomplish what you never did, and found a way to carry on the fight without needing you."_

_Buffy glared at him with hard, narrowed eyes, remembering quite clearly the night he came to her apartment and realizing, in that moment, that __this__ conversation was really the longest one they had had since that night that didn't involve some kind of impending apocalypse. Shrugging away the thought, she rolled her eyes and said, "That's a bunch of bullshit, Angel."_

"_Is it?" Booth retorted. "I think you always got off on the Slayer gig—being told how friggin' great you were, how damn special you were, and how the whole world needed you to save it—and when I came back to Sunnydale to tell you that I was taking the Wolfram & Hart job, it pissed you off because it was yet another sign that the world would find a way to keep that bad shit at bay without you. I didn't need you, and the world didn't need you—at least not the way you thought it did—and that, __that__, Buffy, was the neediest thing of all, huh?"_

"_Needy?" she asked, somewhat in disbelief at his word choice. "You think __I'm__ needy?"_

_Booth rolled his eyes and cocked his head to one side, huffing out a quiet laugh before raising his brows, his face slack with an expression that dared her to explain herself._

"_What a crock," she muttered as anger flared in her eyes as she stabbed the air in front of him with her index finger to punctuate her points. "You know what? If anyone's the needy one here, it's you, Angel. You're the needy one. Your witch-bitch kicked your sorry ass out of her bed, for some goddamn reason that, frankly, I really don't care about, and then you rolled into town and more or less started stalking me. You played up your so-sad, dark and broody schtick to get into my pants, because you felt shitty about getting kicked to the curb by your longtime fuck-buddy."_

_For a few seconds, Booth stood there and glared, his jaw aching from the way he was gritting his teeth as he wondered how much truth there was, at least at some level, in her words. Had it not been for his falling out with Brennan, he probably would never have come to Sunnydale, or if he had, he would not have thrown himself head-first into an affair with the much-younger, more naïve and more innocent Slayer. He wasn't sure, though, whether he pursued the Slayer out of emotional need or because she in a way represented everything that Brennan wasn't, and she was, in a sense, a way to wash away the taste of the pain he felt at squandering the affections of the woman he'd loved for so long. He hated thinking about what he had done, and the pain he'd caused both Brennan—the woman he'd loved for over a century—and the Slayer, who he still had a certain measure of fondness for, even if only nostalgic, despite all the bad blood that had pooled between them._

"_We're done here," he said to her, refusing to reply or even acknowledge what she'd last said. "Okay? Finished."_

_A crooked smile cracked Buffy's face as she realized that she'd obviously hit on a nerve by his blunt dismissal of both her and her accusations. Deciding to push her advantage, she continued to speak. "So it's true, isn't it?" she asked, needling him as she perceived a hint of weakness, an emotional Achilles' heel of sorts, in how her last statement had silenced him. "Isn't that how it really was, Angel?"_

_Booth rolled his shoulders back and stood to his full height as he took a step towards her, closing in on her space with his intimidating form much the same way he did that night years earlier at the L.A. police precinct._

"_It's time for you to go," he said evenly, his voice low and his jaw tense as he looked down at her. "There's nothing else to say, Buffy. It's over. I don't need you here. More importantly, you don't belong here. Go back to New York." He paused for a moment. "Go back to Spike," he said, his grandchilde's name itself a source of annoyance and resentment as he spat out his words. "Go wherever you want, just so long as it's not here so it's far, far away from me and mine, huh?"_

_Her light, almost translucent blond brows furrowed low over her eyes as she glared up at him. "I will," she said, a resentful lilt to her voice as she shook her head ever so slightly, then angled it to one side and gave him a critical look. "And just in case there's any doubt, I am going back to New York when I leave here, and I'm going back to Spike, because he's given me what you never did...what you never could," she said with a smirk, letting the remark hang in the air between them for a few seconds before she continued. "He gets me, and he understands that I'm my own woman. That I'm not some little girl who has to be bossed around or protected. He doesn't try to protect me from the truth, Angel—he tells me the truth and lets me make my own decisions. He_

_doesn't keep secrets from me about the past, or about the women he used to love. He has enough respect for me to tell me the truth. He treats me like an equal, like a grown woman." A faint smile appeared on her lips as she entertained the flash of a private memory. "But you, Angel? You're nothing like him. You kept the truth from me. Maybe you didn't out and out lie to me, but a lie of omission is a lie nonetheless."_

"_Gimme a break, Buffy," he groaned. "Look, if I kept things from you, and I'm not saying I did, but __if__ I ever did that, then I only did it for your own good., okay? Because I knew it was for the best. Because I didn't want you to get hurt." _

_He blinked and looked away as he remembered telling Brennan once that the parents of a murdered girl deserved the kindness of a lie rather than the truth—in that instance, the gory details of their daughter's brutal slaying and the subsequent mutilation of her body—because in that case, telling the whole truth did not serve the ultimate objective of bringing peace to Cleo Eller's long-suffering family and assuaging the anguish they felt at the loss of their only daughter. While for scientists, truth was its own reward, in the years since Booth went into law enforcement, he came to realize that the truth wasn't always an end unto itself. Sometimes a lie, or a strategic omission, was the best means to helping the bereaved find peace in the wake of loss. He wondered if he had done the right thing with Buffy. At that time, knowing what he knew then, he felt that his affair with Brennan was over. Revisiting the details of that relationship, or dissecting its collapse, would not have done either him or Buffy any good. How could he have known at the time that he and Brennan would, given a few years, find a path back to one another? Booth was sure he did the right thing based on what he knew at the time. Hindsight is always 20/20. _

"_Whatever I did, I never did it to hurt you, Buffy."_

"_Right," she grunted, the sarcasm heavy in her voice. "Maybe you did what you did to protect me. Maybe not. In any case, you never treated me like a grown woman...like an adult. The only time you saw fit to do that was the night we made love for the first time...if it was even that and wasn't just sex for you."_

_Booth's eyes widened at the insult, and he rolled a shoulder back as a shiver of anger rippled through him. His mind flashed back to the night he took her to his place, both of them drenched after running through the sewers and through the rain to escape a powerful demon reassembled and called forth by Spike and Drusilla. He remembered the way she'd sat on the edge of his bed, shivering with cold, and how he'd wanted only to protect her—from the cold, from his childe and grandchilde, from danger. He'd wanted to protect her from __everything__ because, in a way, that was the one thing that Buffy had had that Brennan hadn't been able to give him...the ability to rely on him completely and totally for protection. He thought about that, and how during the last argument Angel and Brennan had before they parted ways, she'd told him, "I don't need you." Those words—more than any of thousands of others that passed between them the night they were together last—stuck with him, replaying in his mind on a constant loop as he made his way back to New York and later, after some prodding from the good-natured demon Whistler, to Sunnydale, California. _

_Booth's brows furrowed as he realized that what hurt as much as being told he wasn't wanted was being told he wasn't __needed__. So when he'd come to Sunnydale, he'd found a bright young woman with a fiery, independent spirit who—unlike the powerful 450 year-old witch who'd been his lover for the better part of the last 150 years—needed an ally who could help her, teach her, and protect her. That need for protection set alight something deep inside of Angel that had lay dormant for a very long time, and it was that, more than her youth, that set her apart from the woman he loved so much but who had, it seemed, rejected him and moved on. _

_That was why what he and Buffy did that night was never 'just sex'—not for him and not for her. Buffy trusted him and needed him, and he'd needed to be needed. For those reasons, that night, no matter what she said to him about it now, there was no doubt that on that night, she knew that he cared for her, and she was safe with him, safe enough that she gave herself to him. _

_Booth opened his mouth and was about to defend himself when Buffy began to speak again, cutting him off abruptly once more._

"_It doesn't matter, really," she said with a nod intended more for herself than for him. "Whatever," she muttered with a dismissive wave of her hand. "It just seems like in the end, all it was was a big game, wasn't it? Just one mind-game after another. It wasn't real. It was never real." She fell silent again, drawing a deep breath as she glanced back at the Reflecting Pool and the towering obelisk in the distance, then turned back to him again. "You're right, Angel. We're better off this way. Apart. I'm better off without you...and whatever you've got going on here, I guess you think it's better for you, so...yeah." Hiking up her satchel on her shoulder as she turned to walk away, she grunted out a quiet laugh and said, "Enjoy your new, happy little life, Angel, for what it's worth and while you can." Pausing again, she almost began to walk away when she rocked back on her heels, turned around again and looked at him with a crooked smirk. "Give my best to your wife," she sneered, then turned on her heel and walked away. "Tell her the next time we cross paths, the tea's on me."_

Leaning against the fender of the Mustang with this arms crossed in front of his chest, Booth gave a little shrug as he recalled the angry, hurt look in the Slayer's eyes that day.

"Now you know what I meant when I said it was bad," Booth told Spike. "I wish it hadn't gone that way, and you know, I tried to avoid hurting her, but, she was the way she always is. She didn't know when to quit." He paused for a minute, rubbing his jaw as he sighed before he continued. "I didn't want to say those things to her, Spike. I really didn't, but she kept just pushing, ya know?"

Spike's dark brows arched over his eyes as he shrugged, grunted out a quiet laugh and gave a slight nod. When his gaze meet Booth's, the agent's anxious expression quickly softened and his brown eyes brightened as a faint smile flashed across his lips and he took comfort in the knowledge that at least one person in the world understood what he'd gone through.

"Yeah," Booth continued with a sigh. "So I had to lay it all out for her—that Bren is everything to me, and that no matter what we said between us, it wasn't gonna change what me and Bren are. I mean, all joking and ball-busting aside, you know what she means to me. We've been a part of one another for a long, long time. We've had our ups and downs, and Buffy came along at a time when me and Bren were on the outs, and I was feeling pretty shitty. It's not right or fair, what I did to her—or to Bren—but it is what it is. I can't unring that bell. I really didn't want to go into of all that with Buffy, but she just wouldn't listen, so..." His voice trailed off with a sigh and he shrugged, then shook his head. "Yeah, so anyway..."

"So you called me," Spike drawled, as he blinked several times, considering what his grandsire had just told him. "Why again? Not just for this stuff with Elphie, right? Because I gotta tell ya, mate, it sounds as if there's a bit more going on there then you'd probably like to admit, huh? Maybe...you wanted to know if she was okay?"

Booth's eyebrows furrowed, sloping low and hard over his eyes as he shot Spike an irritated look. The vampire crossed his arms and arched a suspicious brow. Knowing he was caught, Booth raked his hand through his hair and licked his lips. "Yeah, okay," he admitted with a roll of his eyes that betrayed his reluctance in acknowledging that, for all of his faults, his grandchilde probably knew him better than anyone other than Brennan herself "Okay, fine—that was part of it. Even though the whole thing with Buffy ended in a colossal shitstorm, and I had to get a little rough before the message got through, I'm not a total asshole. I didn't want to hurt her, so yeah, okay? You're right. I called because I wanted to make sure she was alright."

Booth fell silent for a moment, and glanced over at his daughter, who—to her father's amazement—continued to sit quietly in her car seat sucking contentedly on her pacifier. He drew a deep breath and turned back to Spike, ruffling his thick mop of unkempt brown hair as he struggled for words.

"But yeah, it's more than that," he said. "It's not just...well, it's just that, umm...well, I'd like to think that Buffy's gonna take me at my word. I mean, you have no idea how much shit I took from Bones after her run-in with Buffy on the Mall. And, just in case—I don't know—well, if Buffy gets it in her head somehow that she needs my help or wants to check on me again, I need to know before she actually does anything. Same goes for Connor and Dru. I-I...I can't risk my life here, Spike. I can't get pulled back in. I mean, right now, you and Buffy and Bren are the only ones who know that I'm alive and living here. Right now, I've got a bit of safety. But, if others start popping up...Connor or Dru or whoever, it's only gonna be a matter of time before some major mystical supernatural shit starts going down here—whether it's the Senior Partners or some vamp with an axe to grind because of some shit I pulled when I was Angelus or whatever—and I can't have that. I need to protect my family—to keep them safe. And, the best way for that to happen is for me to stay Special Agent Seeley Booth of the FBI...and for everyone else to forget that I ever was Angel."

Spike stared at him for a minute and then nodded. "Too right. For once, you and I actually agree on something." He paused and then shook his head with a grimace. "Weird, huh? Let's not make a habit of this, okay? It's really creepin' me out."

Booth could only chuckle in response, then raised his brows expectantly.

At seeing the agent's solicitous tell, Spike couldn't resist the chance to get in one last needling dig on his old rival. "So you want _me _to do _you _a favor?" he asked, making no attempt to hide the smirk that spread across his face. "To do your bumsucker self a good turn, yeah?"

"Come on, Spike," Booth groaned. "I already told you what I wanted you to do." Rubbing his tired, bloodshot eyes again with the heel of his hand, he sighed and let his South Philly accent bleed through on the edge of his voice as he said, "So. Yeah. Now...tell me. Are you gonna do it or what?" When the vampire just grinned with an amused flicker in his pale blue eyes, Booth grumbled. "Jesus, you're such a fucking pain in the ass. For fuck's sake—cut the crap. Are you gonna help me out or..." His voice trailed off as he realized there was no 'or' because he didn't have a Plan B.

"Don't be uncouth, boyo," Spike said. "Didn't your ma back in the old country teach your worthless sot self any manners at all?" Seeing Booth's jaw tense, he snickered and relented. "All you need to do is say 'please', all nice and pretty there, and I'll probably say yes just so I can get goin' since you'll yammer on until sunrise if I don't, you silly little pouf."

A quiet growl rattled in the back of Booth's throat as he glared at his old rival. "Seriously?" he huffed."You want me to say _that?_"

Spike jerked his chin up and peered back through narrowed eyes as he gave a self-satisfied smirk like the cat that swallowed the canary. "Mmm-hmmm," he murmured pleasantly, cupping one of his hands to his ears as he spoke. "Come on, Angel. I'm all ears. And you can do it, mate. I know you can."

Booth arched his head back and looked skyward, muttering an unintelligible string of curses under his breath before bringing his eyes back down to meet Spike's. "Fine," he grunted. "Please? Will you _please _help me?" Figuring that if he was in for a penny, he was in for a pound, he added, "And if not for me, then for Bren?"

Spike stared blankly at him for several seemingly interminable seconds, prolonging Booth's agony before he finally relented and, with his lips curved into a crooked-mouthed grin, nodded. "Okay," he said. "Fair enough. So, if I get word on Goldilocks, the Junior Bint, or Dru, or any of our other old acquaintances for that matter, sniffing around you and I hear anything about them getting some crazy idea to go off on a lark to the District, I'll phone you promptly. Got it. Anything else?"

"No," Booth said, letting go of the breath he'd been holding as he sighed in relief. "That's basically it. I just...I didn't think you'd agree unless you saw, in person, why I was doing this." He flashed his brows for emphasis before jerking his thumb to indicate the baby. "I'd like to think that Buffy will let this lie, but you know...something always comes up, right? Some damn prophecy that seems to pop up like they're coming out of a Pez dispenser, or a friggin' revenge threat from the past, or even some new twist on the latest impending apocalypse. She'll hear about it, freak out, and despite how we left things, she'll come traipsing back into my life. And, I can't take that risk. Not with Bren and Katie. I just can't."

"Too right," Spike said as he stuffed his hands into the pockets of his black leather duster and nodded at him. "So, I think that's that then, right? Trip down memory lane complete. Our tête-à-tête's quite happily done. All's good. I've got your number. Don't call me—I'll call you. All that shit, blah blah blah. And, we're golden." Spike turned back to the car seat and smiled at the baby. "Keep 'im on his toes, Bluebell. He needs it." The baby's only response was to blink a few times and wiggle the binky in her mouth with a sucking sound as she smacked her lips. Spike laughed silently before he turned back to Booth. "Normally, I'd say see ya 'round, Peaches. But, since we both don't want that, I'll say I hope I don't see your ugly forehead darkening my door anytime soon, huh?"

"Right back 'atchya, Spike," Booth nodded as he gave the vampire a final nod goodbye. "Feeling's definitely fuckin' mutual."

Flashing Booth one last look, Spike turned around and began to walk away as he called out over his shoulder, "Ta."

* * *

**-tbc-**

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**A/N2: **So, there we have it. The epic confrontation with Booth and Buffy in its entirety. What did everyone think? Did it live up to the build up and expectations? We hope we did it just since we know it's been a long time in coming. We know there are some Buffy and/or Buffy/Angel fans out there. And, as we've said before on the topic before, we tried very hard not to make Buffy a one-dimensional Mary-Sue just for the purposes of this story. However, we (and by now, we assume you all do if you're still reading this story) know where we're headed are far as Booth and Brennan. So obviously we've taken Buffy and made a version of her that fits *our* world. We just hope at least the motivations and reactions behind her actions are realistic, so we'd love to hear back from everyone on that if anyone wants to be so kind as to toss any creative comments are way. ::pause:: Hell, strike that. At this point, we'll take *any* type of feedback. We won't be so picky as to demand it be creative. So, that having been said, coming up next...Bren has been largely silent from this story thus far. What's she been up to while Booth's been having his little tête-à-tête with Spike? And what happens next when she gets a *very* interesting text message while Booth's gone? Should make for interesting fireworks with these two by the time Booth gets home with the baby. So, stay tuned!


	4. Pt 4: Brooding Ruminations

**Hand to Hand**

**By:** Lesera128 & dharmamonkey

**Rated: **M

**Disclaimer: **Here we posit our normal rigmarole. No, we don't own anything from _Bones _or _Angel... _or anything else. Yes, we're wreaking what havoc we can with these characters that we don't own to create an awesome story. But, since it's only for the purposes of creative enjoyment and amusing distraction, we think we're okay. Are there any other questions? No? ::blinks:: Good. Then, moving on―

**Summary: **See Part I.

**Logistical Notes: **See Part I.

**A/N:** Ummm. Not a lot to say here...expect...well, like what you're reading here? Then don't forget to check out the latest companion pieces to the world of Angel/Booth and Witchy Brennan that post under dharmamonkey's account. Some excellent fill-in-the-backstory memories with Brennan and Spike c. mid-1990s are going on as we speak in "A Compendium of Lost Moments." So, go ahead...check it out. And, don't forget to enjoy this piece while you're at it.**  
**

**UNF Alert: **Alas. While there's lots of good stuff in this chapter, it's more of the warm fuzzies type than the sweaty/heart pumping stuff. But, stay tuned. It's in the pipeline. Promise.

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**Part IV: Brooding Ruminations**

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After a few minutes, when Spike's receding form had thankfully disappeared into the shadows, Booth eventually came back to the hood of the Mustang convertible with a weary sigh. He looked at the baby, who was still watching him attentively as she sucked her pacifier. He smiled faintly as he thought about her impromptu staring contest with a 150 year-old vampire, which contest she'd managed to win, and he couldn't help but feel a warm swell of pride spread through his chest.

From the very first instant he'd seen her, he knew she was something special. It wasn't simply a matter of what Brennan called paternal pride, but was also because, from the minute he looked into her baby blue eyes, he knew there was just _something _about her. There was a brightness and an intensity that was too powerful, too focused and—for the lack of a better word—too mature to be just a random twinkle amplified by a father's love into something more than it was. He knew she wasn't just an ordinary child because her mother was no ordinary woman. And, he loved them both for that even more, if such a thing was possible, and he was proud to acknowledge the truth of that fact from the very first moment he'd met her.

_He sat at her bedside, grinning from ear to ear as his eyes welled up with tears when the nurse-midwife gently handed his wife the tiny, mewling bundle that was their daughter, Kathryn. Brennan held out her arms, gesturing with a bit of an impatient wave, a weary smile on her face as she accepted the child into her arms and pulled her close to cradle the child against her breast. Once the nurse had disappeared, and only when they were alone, Brennan finally let some of her stone cold professionalism disappear from her face. In its place was a gentle vulnerability that few outside her immediate family had ever seen as she pressed a soft kiss to the baby's smooth forehead._

"_She's beautiful," she said, her voice thick and cracking with emotion, but yet still somehow, even when she'd made that simple statement as if she'd stated a well-known fact that would brook no argument—like two plus two equaling four or infinity going on forever in both directions—there was an incredible confidence in her statement. For a few seconds, she didn't look up at Booth, but just held her daughter, gently but snugly, and simply stared at the baby, dazed by the experience she'd just gone through and exhausted by the effort and the pain of childbirth before she repeated a single word. "Beautiful."_

_Booth swallowed and leaned forward in his chair, reaching his big hand out to stroke the slightly damp fluff of soft auburn hair on his daughter's head. "She's incredible," he agreed, the smile on his face brightening his soft voice. "Gorgeous. Beautiful. Absolutely stunning."_

_His wife gave him an appraising look for a long moment and then nodded. "Yes, she is," she agreed sharply, a mildly suspicious and somewhat non sequitur expression crossing her face before the baby let out a small gurgle and it caused Brennan to look down as she smiled in an extremely pleased way at her daughter. "Damn straight, she is."_

_Chuckling a bit, Booth pointed at the baby as he said, "She's got your hair. And your cheekbones, I think. And look at those eyes and eyelashes and her baby blues__—Bren, she's gonna look just like you."_

_After another moment of careful study of the miracle they'd produced, Brennan looked over at her husband, narrowing her eyes which were tired, dry and heavy-lidded after the exhausting labor. "Booth," she said to him. "Most babies are born with light-colored eyes. It will be months before we know what color her eyes will actually be on a permanent basis until whatever melanin that's going to color her irises disperses. So, there's at least a fifty percent chance that she'll have brown eyes, since you have at least one dominant allele for brown eyes, and possibly two, in which case there's no way we could ever have a blue-eyed child since you wouldn't have the requisite recessive allele to pass on to her like I have that would result in her having those so called 'baby blues' as you ubiquitously refer to them."_

_Booth's eyes squinted at her words and suddenly a memory flashed through his mind. _

"_My mother," he mouthed almost silently, speaking almost before he'd realized what he'd said, unable to help himself as he thought out loud more than spoke to purposefully convey anything to Brennan. "My mother had blue eyes." _

_He remembered her oval face with its long nose and high cheekbones, and how long her dark brown hair was when she let her curled tresses fall about her shoulders in the privacy of the family home. Booth saw her cheekbones and her wavy dark hair in the mirror every morning, but it was the one feature she did not convey to him—her shimmering blue eyes, reminiscent of Brennan's in a way, but paler and more distant—that sent a chill crackling through him. He remembered seeing the light go out behind those eyes the night he slaughtered his family in their home after laying waste to the rest of their village on the outskirts of Galway. _

_Booth blinked away the painful image, glancing over at his infant daughter curled in her mother's protective arms. "So maybe she'll have blue eyes," he said, a certain blankness in his tone of voice as the gravity of the memory clung to him. "Yeah, maybe she will. I think that would be awesome, don't you?" He looked at her with an almost pleading look on his face as he tempted her to comment on his question. "I'd love to see her have your eyes, Bren," he added, then he fell silent again and the gentle smile on his face quickly faded. _

_For a moment, Brennan looked at him, surprised by the sudden shift in his mood. He'd never spoken much of his mother, and for her part, Brennan had never pressed him about it. Over the years since they became partners, she'd learn an errant fact about his alcoholic and abusive father every so often. In truth, she'd often learned more from Jared than from Booth. Perhaps that was part of what had intrigued her about Booth's brother (the other part being, of course, the novelty of her partner having a brother since her longtime Irish lover had had only a younger sister, who had died more than a century before she met him)—Jared seemed more open to talking about their childhood than Booth ever had. For Booth, his childhood was something he avoided talking about, except for inane subjects like breakfast cereals he'd liked or sports idols he'd worshipped. But for Jared, it seemed that his childhood memories, while not entirely pleasant, weren't as tightly bound up in pain and guilt as Booth's were. From the very first day Booth had walked into her lecture hall at American University, she had wanted to know more about him, and where he came from, so she could understand who he was now that he was no longer the man she knew for a century and a half. But he had proven a very, very tough nut to crack in that regard. While willing to discuss just about anything else with her from his life as Booth, whether it was the violence he'd committed as a soldier to the tortures he himself had undergone, he'd always been particularly reticent about his parents, and she knew virtually nothing about his mother. She knew she'd been absent for the latter part of his childhood in Philadelphia, but she was unsure of the circumstances of her passing. _

_Yet there was something intense about his reaction in that moment that struck her as she could sense the darkness that hung like a pall over his words. Then, almost as if she had an epiphany from a delayed thought process given her exhausted state, it suddenly occurred to her that the mother of which he spoke—whose very mention threatened to set in motion a rapid descent into dark and inconsolable brooding that she very much wanted to avoid—was not the mother who'd raised him in Pennsylvania. She saw him breathe a sad sigh as his head fell, and he stared at his lap for a second before he brought his eyes up again to meet hers. _

_As soon as their eyes met, she saw it—a tightly coiling pain that called to mind the brokenness of spirit and self-loathing she saw in his brown gaze the windy Halloween night she found him cold and starving in a dark alley off Halsted Street in Chicago. As she saw the anguished look in his eyes, she realized the mother he referred to was the one who had raised him an ocean away in Galway more than two centuries earlier. His reaction aroused her curiosity, but she didn't press him on it, and instead made a silent mental note to address it later, someday when the time was right. She nodded in quiet acknowledgment and gave her newborn daughter another light kiss to the forehead before handing her to him, smiling as she saw his dark eyes brighten as he accepted the child, his big, veiny, thick-fingered hands dwarfing the baby's body and limbs as he took her into the crook of his muscular arm._

_Booth studied the child for a moment, still amazed at what they'd managed to produce. "She's so tiny," he said quietly, an irrepressible smile on his lips as he stroked his big index finger over his daughter's little brow, which furrowed instinctively at his touch. _

_For her part, Brennan frowned a bit at his words. "The pediatrician who examined her after the delivery said that her vital statistics are quite within the average mean for a child that was born at thirty-eight and a half weeks' gestation, Booth, in both length and weight to say nothing of lung capacity and—"_

"_I know," he said in a soft, low voice, caught up in the magical calm of the moment and seemingly reluctant to do anything to shatter that quiet. "But she's still so itty-bitty, Bren. So tiny and so beautiful." Each syllable came slowly as if he were mesmerized. "I can't help it. She's just georgeous…my beautiful baby girl."_

_Somewhat mollified by his response, Brennan observed scientifically, "It's to be expected that she will lose approximately ten percent of her birth weight in the first five to seven days after her delivery. So, although she may seem tiny now, she actually is bigger than what she will be in a week or so when we can expect her to be approximately six and a half pounds."_

"_Bren," he whispered with a breathy laugh. "You're kind of killing the moment, lass." He stroked the uncalloused edge of his thumb over the infant's faint, almost non-existent eyebrow. "God, she's so amazing…" The child winced a little at the contact and squirmed a bit, then murmured and settled again in his arms. "She'll be just as beautiful after she skinnies up a little as she will when she chubbies up again." _

_Brennan made a face at his wording, but largely ignored it, choosing instead to focus on the larger point of her child's well-being. "I've been reading several studies that indicate that she will most quickly regain that lost weight if I breastfeed her," Brennan told him. "However, since I know that bonding with the baby is an important thing for you to do as her father, I believe that as we previously discussed, I'm going to pump my milk, and we'll just take turns feeding her with a bottle."_

_He nodded at her in response before he spoke. "I can't wait," he said with a sincere smile. "I like the idea of us both being able to feed her. I mean, I know she'll recognize her daddy's voice because she's been listening to me talk to her for the last few months, but still…" He shrugged a little. "I'm glad I get to help feed her, too. I...well...it means a lot, Bren." _

_For a minute, he just looked at his daughter and then at his wife—his two girls, as he thought of them, though he wasn't sure how Brennan would react to being thought of as a 'girl' let alone as being possessed by him. His cheeks flushed and his face brightened with a grin he couldn't suppress if he'd wanted to, and he felt as if he wanted to gather them both up in his arms and hold them forever. After a moment, his thoughts began to drift, and he wondered what it would feel like to finally feed the tiny child a bottle for the first time. While he'd fed a baby a bottle before, many times, in fact, there was still something magic about the idea of feeding this __particular__ little one, his daughter. a bottle for the first time. _

"_I wonder if she'll have my appetite or yours, lass," he mused, gently caressing the infant's fluffy hair, which clearly took its color from her mother. Looking down at the child, he cooed to her, "Are we gonna have to have a burger and fries and a strawberry shake on standby for you, princess?"_

_Brennan rolled her eyes and shook her head, amused at his gushing if somewhat silly display of sentimentality. _

_In response, Booth merely chuckled and winked at her. Then, looking down at the baby, he grinned. "I love you, little girl," he whispered to the child, who smacked her lips as if in response to her father's voice. "Welcome to the world, kiddo. We've been waiting for you for what seems like forever."_

_The rosy-cheeked newborn suddenly squeezed her eyes shut and began to cry. Booth's brows flew up and his forehead creased as he frowned, quite sure in that moment that he'd done something wrong. He rocked the infant back in forth in his arms and tried to shush her with his soothing whispers, his lips pouting a bit as the child's mewling cry grew louder, and he felt her squirming in the blanket she was swaddled in._

_Brennan smiled faintly at his reaction and felt her breasts begin to finally leak at the sound of her daughter's cry. "I didn't think the colostrum would come in this quickly, but I'm starting to leak," she said to him with a nod of her chin._

"_Oh, umm," Booth said, puzzled and feeling both a little helpless and ignorant about what was happening. He wanted to comfort his child but all he had was the comfort of his big arms and the sound of his heartbeat that he hoped the little one could hear or feel through his shirt. "Bren, ummm…" His words trailed off as he looked at his wife with a pleading look. "Help?" Brennan tilted her head and studied the child as he stammered, "I, uhhh, I'm not sure, but I think she's hungry." _

_Frowning a bit at the sniffling baby, Brennan responded, "I know she's hungry, but if I try to breastfeed her now, she'll get confused, and she may have trouble adapting to a bottle's nipple. So, if you can help me with the breast pump like the nurse explained, I'll see what I can get to put into a bottle for her." Sighing a bit, she then added, "She's just going to have to learn to be patient."_

_Booth had to resist rolling his eyes at her words. "Patient?" he snickered. "She's a baby, Bren, and babies really don't do patient. Not even really smart ones like ours." _

_In response, Brennan shot him a look, but remained silent. After he'd temporarily handed the crying baby to her mother, he helped bring around the portable breast pump so that Brennan could adjust it in hopes of getting some sustenance for her daughter. As she was occupied with the breast pump, Booth reached for where Brennan had the baby cradled on a pillow in her lap. He gathered the child in his arms again and began to rock her back and forth, humming softly as he tried to quiet her. For her part, the baby watched her father, wide-eyed and open-mouthed, her arms moving to and fro, her fists clenching and unclenching as she turned her face away from the warmth of where he kept her snuggled next to his chest. _

_A few moments later, when Brennan had pumped a respectable amount of liquid for her daughter, she reclaimed the baby as she gave Booth the task of transferring the milk into one of the waiting bottles._

_Watching him with a critical eye that she normally reserved for her interns in the lab, Brennan warned him, "Be careful, Booth. Don't spill it."_

_Booth shot her a quirk-browed look. "Have a little confidence in me, Bren, okay?" he said as he carefully transferred the thick breast milk into the bottle. "I was a sniper, alright? I think I can handle this." As he screwed the nippled cap on the bottle, he looked up and grinned. "Besides, I was a bartender, too. Milk, beer, whiskey—it's all more or less the same, right?" _

_Brennan resisted the urge to roll her eyes, but merely took the bottle once Booth had prepared it under her watchful stare. Propping the baby into a semi-upright position in the crook of her arm, she gave Booth a thankful smile when he slipped a spare pillow under her arm to help her support the delicate bundle she held. _

"_I guess she's not very patient when she's hungry, huh?" he asked Brennan as she shifted to try and get into a comfortable position from which she could feed the baby._

_Arching an auburn eyebrow at him as a small smirk tugged at the corner of her lips, she asked, "You mean, like father, like daughter?"_

_Booth's eyes narrowed teasingly. "Maybe," he said. "I mean, she looks just like you. So, she's gotta end up with something from her daddy, huh?" _

_For her part, the baby, whose cries of annoyance had grown sharper with each passing moment, only quieted when Brennan gently nudged her lips open and popped the bottle's nipple into her mouth. The baby seemed to make a face at the strange sensation, but after a couple of moments when both parents had been silently urging her on, she at last began to suck. Brennan let out a small sigh of relief as she watched her daughter nurse. After another minute, she turned her head to look at her husband before she spoke. _

"_Intellectually, I'm well aware that she's behaving completely in accordance with her natural instinct, but still, sitting here and watching it? Well, there's just something undeniably amazing about it, Booth..."_

"_She is amazing," he agreed, slowly reaching his hand out to lightly touch the downy auburn fluff on the back of his daughter's head, wanting in that moment to feel connected somehow to the incredible bond he saw between his wife and child as they lay together while Brennan fed the baby in her hospital bed. _

_Smiling back at him, she then added, "I know I didn't ask if you minded if I gave her her first bottle, but I figured since she will need to be fed again in approximately three hours, you wouldn't mind if I exercised a mother's prerogative and let you take the second 'first' feeding?"_

"_Mother's prerogative?" he chuckled. "Hmm. Sounds like hooey to me, lass, but since you did carry her around for almost nine months, I suppose I can let it slide." He winked even as Brennan rolled his eyes at him, but remained quiet as he then sat back and just watched the two of them with a flush-cheeked expression of awe. _

_And so they sat there—Brennan feeding the child and getting the tiniest of burps from her before rocking the child to sleep, and Booth sitting in the chair next to the bed, smiling so broadly and for so long that he swore his cheeks actually hurt. After a little while, he looked over at the piece of paper on the table next to his chair, narrowed his eyes as he remembered what it was, and then reached for it, clumsily grabbing at the George Washington University Hospital ballpoint pen that nearly rolled off the table._

"_Hmmm," he murmured as he held the paper up and looked at all the little boxes on the form._

"_What?" Brennan answered in a soft voice, as she looked up from where her head had been lolling forward as her heavy eyes almost closed shut from the extreme fatigue she felt. "What's wrong?"_

_Chuckling a bit at her assumption that something negative had just transpired, Booth grinned at her. "Not every time something happens is it gonna be bad news, Bones. You know that."_

_Rolling both of her shoulders ever so slightly, Brennan let her eyes fall shut again as she said, "True. But I'm just being realistic, Booth. More often than not, less than positive things happen to us."_

"_Relax, Bones," he said. "Don't be such a worry-wort, okay? You've got the next twenty years to worry, and I know you will because it's your nature. So for now, just try to chill, okay?" _

_Cracking a single eye open at him, Brennan said, "Be that as it may, it's better to be overprepared because of excessive worry then not prepared enough because of a lack of foresight..."_

"_Don't I know it?" Booth laughed. "Taking a two-day trip with you is like a Mount Everest expedition, except I'm the Sherpa who gets to carry all your stuff." He looked at her and their now-sleeping newborn and winked. "Come on, Bren...you take the ol' Boy Scout motto 'always prepared' to a whole new level." _

_Making a face at him as she stuck out her tongue, Brennan made a _pfft _sound. She then added, "And, just for the official record, just because I'm not taking you to task about the inability of me to actually 'chill' myself literally because I'm tired, it doesn't mean I didn't notice." She gave him a pointed look, to which this time it was Booth's turn to roll his eyes at his wife. Brennan ignored it as she then asked, "Anyway, you were saying?_

"_Heh," he chuckled, knowing that was his wife's way of wanting to change the subject. "Yeah, anyway...it's just, you know when the nurse came in to tell us about how you could use the breast pump, she also left this stack of paperwork here that happens to include the hospital's forms about how we want them to register the vital statistics of her birth. And, well, ya know, for all the time we spent talking about what to name her—"_

_Suddenly realizing to which topic he was referring, both of Brennan's eyes snapped open. "We decided this a month ago," she groused, a certain edge to her voice which suddenly dropped to a whisper as she felt the child wriggle against her then settle again. "More than a month ago, actually. Her name is Kathryn," she said quietly but firmly._

"_Simmer down, okay?" Booth said, holding up his hand as he shook his head with a laugh. "Lookit, okay? Yeah, we agreed on Kathryn as a name." He paused for a moment and gazed dreamily on the face of their baby girl, whose newborn lips pouted adorably as she snoozed against her mother's gown-draped breast. "It's a beautiful name for our beautiful little girl. But, lass—we never talked about a middle name. It's gonna be Kathryn __what__?"_

_As she contemplated his words, Brennan grunted quietly as she realized he was right, and that amazingly they'd never discussed the subject of a middle name for their child. "Not Christine," she said suddenly, remembering how they'd eliminated that one early on. It was her mother's name, and while she had more or less come to peace with her mother's passing—and the fact that her mother left this world on the eve of Brennan's thirteenth birthday, her death the final payment on account for the bargain she'd struck with The One to be able to conceive a child—the memory of it, and the feelings the mere mention of her mother's name stirred up in her, nearly five centuries later, were still too raw to even consider naming the child for her long-dead grandmother. "I know Dad would like it, but I just can't…" She looked down at the sleeping newborn and stroked her hand over the child's delicate temple, feeling where the bones of her tiny skull had yet to fuse. After a moment, she looked up again and asked, "What about 'Angela' as a middle name?"_

_Booth's heavy brow immediately knit hard over his dark, deep-set eyes as he stared into his lap for a few seconds before he finally shook his head. "Nuh-uh," he told her. "No good." _

_Tilting her head at his quick objection, she frowned a bit at him. "What do you mean 'nuh-uh,' Booth?" Brennan asked him. "Why not? Angela's my closest friend…"_

_Booth cocked his head to the side and shot her an incredulous look. "You're kidding, right?" She stared back at him blankly and shook her head. "No way, Bren," he said, shaking his head. "Remember? We talked about this. No naming the kid after me."_

_His dark brow furrowed, sloping low over his shimmering brown eyes as he shook his head and briefly looked away, his lips pursing so hard they seemed to come to a point as his temple pulsed. _

_Brennan saw how quickly his mood shifted and looked back at him in puzzlement. "But, I don't understand. We wouldn't be," she protested, her voice rising an octave and causing the baby to stir in her arms which caused Brennan to modulate her tone before she continued. "We'd be naming her after Angela, Booth. Not you."_

_Booth stared at her for a split second and then vehemently shook his head. "No way," he huffed. "No way, no how, Bren," he said with a rattling sigh. He brought his hand up, pinched the bridge of his nose and rubbed his eyes with the heel of his palm, suddenly feeling his exhaustion in a way that he hadn't until then despite having been awake for thirty-some consecutive hours, twenty-some of which were spent on the phone, calling and texting and fretting over Brennan who was in Baltimore giving a lecture at a conference at Johns Hopkins when her water had broken. _

"_Come on, lass," he said tiredly. "I'm wiped, okay, so I can only imagine how zonked you are, plus you've got all those mommy hormones sloshing around right now so that your mega-genius brain is stuck in mommy brain mode right now. So maybe you've forgotten, but think about it, alright? Angela/Angelus?" He threaded his fingers through his ruffled, slightly greasy hair and shot her a pointed look before he shook his head again. "Nah-uh, no," he said. "No dice. Ain't happenin', so try again, lass." _

_He punctuated his statement with a low growl that rumbled in his throat and signaled the true extent of his disgust, which in turn made Brennan's features slacken briefly as she realized her error in failing to note the phonetic similarity between the two names. She silently chastised herself for the obvious mistake_—_consoled only by the fact that she told herself she wasn't up to her usual self given the trauma of childbirth that she'd just gone through_—_as she watched him tap the pen on his thigh as he narrowed his eyes, his features scrunching up in a near-scowl that Brennan long ago learned to recognize as his so-called 'thinking face.'_

_The sleeping newborn squirmed and murmured, turning her head and smacking her tiny lips as she moved her little arms, then settled down again into slumber._

"_Stephanie," Brennan said quietly, so quietly that Booth wasn't even sure he'd heard her speak._

"_Hmmm?" he asked her, tilting his head in curiosity. "What'd you say?"_

"_Stephanie," she said again, slightly louder this time, but careful not to be so loud as to disturb the baby again. She watched his dark eyes shift from side to side as he nibbled the inside of his lip and considered the proposal. Feeling a bit more clarification was needed, she added, "My father's...well, you know...Steph?" She blinked at him several times as she explained. "Steph...she was my mother's best friend. The woman who was a mother to me after my mother died? What about if we chose the baby's middle name after her? Kathryn Stephanie..."_

_Booth leaned back in his chair, fiddling with the pen and holding it between his forefingers as he remembered holding a cigarette the same way as he hunched over a bar in New York's Bowery sixty years earlier and watched a middle-aged blonde woman with enigmatic green eyes lay out an array of tarot cards on the bar next to him. _"You're not the only one wandering the world, looking for answers," _she'd told him. _"And, while I can't tell you what the answers are, I'm pretty sure that the farther you two wander, the clearer those answers will become. And when you're both done wandering, you'll find out how to achieve that wholeness that you're each looking for." _Though he'd remained skeptical, he never gave up the tiny glimmer of hope she'd instilled in him that he and Brennan would finally find a way to be together. And while it took the two of them another sixty-some years to figure out how to make it work, in the end, Stephanie was right. Booth looked up, drinking in the sight of his wife and longtime love cradling their newborn daughter against her breast as the child slept, and he realized what it was he finally felt in the minutes after his daughter came into the world: wholeness. Stephanie, his father-in-law's longtime partner, had been right all along, and what Booth had always wanted had finally come to pass. _

_He felt whole._

"_Okay," he said after a minute. "I could go with that. Kathryn Stephanie...Brennan-Booth." _

_Brennan's brow immediately furrowed as her smile turned to a grimace. "No," she said, the syllables almost snipped. "I don't like that."_

"_Huh?" Booth responded, a bit of mock confusion on his face. "What's that?"_

_Making a face at him, Brennan said sharply, "No hyphenation."_

_Booth cocked his head to the side and leveled a skeptical, narrow-eyed look at her. "But I thought you wanted to keep your name, Bren," he said, the faint smile on his lips bleeding into the edge of his voice. "I mean, You made quite a big deal of not changing your name when we got married. So I just, you know, figured that you'd want our daughter to have both our names."_

"_No, Booth," she said with a shake of her head. "Me keeping my name is a separate issue, and I don't know why you keep bringing it up. I've explained to you the reason I've retained my maiden name."_

"_I dunno," he muttered, unable to completely bite back a grin. "I think you might've mentioned something or the other about it, I guess, once or twice, but it must've slipped my mind or something." _

_Rolling her eyes at him, Brennan responded in exactly the way Booth had expected her to. "I've lived nearly five centuries with that name, and have in the last decade or so established a professional reputation under that name. So, it's quite logical that I wasn't going to change it." _

"_Logical," he grunted, slumping his muscular shoulders a little as he fiddled with the pen and frowned, his brows arching up as he pouted his pink, chapped lips in as sorry a hangdog look as he could muster without dissolving into a fit of snickering. "All this time, and all those I-love-you's, and you don't want to take my name, huh?" He gave her a pointed nod as he then continued. " I guess I'm good enough to keep around to do the heavy lifting and have something sexy to look at, and maybe even marry, but not good enough to share a name with, huh?" His brow quivered as he looked at her and then away again lest he snort out a laugh._

_She paused, glancing down again at their daughter who slept quietly in her arms as she let her annoyance dissipate. Finally picking up on the fact that Booth was teasing her, she sighed, "I really hate it when you do that, you know?"_

"_Yeah," he shrugged as his feigned frown morphed into a big, toothy grin and he cocked his head to the side as he drank in the sight of her—her blue eyes softer than he'd seen them in years, perhaps not since the first few years after their affair resumed when they reunited in Chicago in 1923, and her hair, mussed and drawn back into a messy ponytail as a few wisps still clung to her forehead even though the perspiration of labor had all but evaporated away. His own eyes softened and his grin eased into a sweet smile. "I can't help it, lass, 'cause it works every time. You can't resist my puppy-dog eyes. You couldn't back then when I'd use 'em on you to bail my ass outta trouble back in London, and you can't now." He chuckled. "You know it's true."_

_Looking up from their sleeping daughter to her husband, Brennan said, "Be that as it may, all teasing aside, I don't want our daughter to have a hyphenated name. Besides, with all your names to choose from, which ones would we be working with, hmm?"_

"_I dunno," he said with a grin. "Thing is, most of those name changes weren't really of my choosing." He thought about it for a second, then shrugged. "The couple o' times I really got to pick my own name—when I enlisted back in Londonderry in 1916, and then when I got me a fake New York driver's license in '46, then again in Illinois in '78—I used __Brennan__ as a last name. So...see? I'm a pretty open-minded guy, and really have been for a while now, just so you know."_

_Shaking her head, Brennan responded, "Outside of certain cultural traditions that go back for centuries where family lineages are reflected in the names of offspring, such as in the naming conventions that are predominant in Spain and Latin America, it's pretentious and obnoxious to hyphenate. Her name isn't something that she needs to be confused about. Ever." Nodding as she gently rubbed the side of her thumb over the infant's tiny, round little shoulder. "She's Kathryn Stephanie Booth. The end."_

_Booth grinned the smile of a proud father as he set the hospital paperwork down on the table that normally held Brennan's food trays. He stood up and took a seat on the edge of the bed, then leaned in and pressed a kiss to the silky, downy hair on the crown of his daughter's head. "Welcome home, Kathryn Stephanie Booth." He then snaked his arm around Brennan's shoulder and placed a gentle hand around his daughter's sleeping form, amazed at how small and serene she was, not an hour after coming into the world. He leaned over and place another small kiss on the crown of Kathryn's sleeping head, then raised his chin and gazed into Brennan's eyes. "I love you," he whispered as he leaned in, angled his head and brushed his lips across hers. Her only answer was a warm if somewhat tired sigh as she languidly closed her eyes, parted her lips and kissed him back tenderly.  
_

"You know," he said, as he came up and tickled the soft pink fleshy curve of the baby's cheek with the calloused tip of his index finger. "I love you as much today as I did the day you were born, kiddo, but your mother's gonna be _very_ pissed off at me if you aren't asleep by the time we get home. She's gonna bitch about me having knocked you off your schedule or something because you're going to want to sleep when it's time to be up and then you'll be ready to rock and roll tonight when she and I are ready to drop dead from exhaustion."

The child cooed and waved her little fists in the air as she tried to reach for her father's shirtsleeve. She made a sound—one that Brennan had insisted was just a gurgle but that Booth swore was the beginnings of a throaty laugh he hoped would be the echo of her mother's—and another grab for his rolled-up sleeve.

"You're gonna be the end of me, princess," he told her, shifting his arm so her grabby little hand could close around his thumb. "You've got all this energy, and I don't know where you're gettin' it." The infant made a murmuring sound as she tugged at her father's thick, calloused thumb. "Maybe your mama and I need to be drinkin' some of that formula we've been feeding you, 'cause you're just a little baby bottle rocket."

He felt the bleariness in his eyes as he squeezed them shut and opened them again, suddenly feeling the cumulative effect of ten weeks without getting more than four or five hours of sleep a night combined with a very, very long day the day before. It was as if in an instant all of that exhaustion slammed into him like a runaway freight train.

As suddenly as it came on, the heavy feeling of exhaustion seemed to lift as Kathryn gurgled again and squeezed his thumb with a strength that filled him with both pride and amazement. Still, even as he felt a second wind coming on, the very thought of exhaustion reminded him of the first month of his daughter's life.

_Brennan and the baby had hardly been home from the hospital a week when her sister-in-law, Russ' wife Amy, had stopped by to see the baby and wish the two of them well, and inadvertently gave her the flu, which had apparently been going around her daughters' elementary school. _

_Two days later, Brennan fell ill, wracked with a 103° fever and body aches that made it painful to roll over in bed, much less get up for anything other than to go to the bathroom. She had a dry, hacking cough and a runny nose, and was so fatigued that it became clear very quickly that she was in no condition to be getting out of bed every couple of hours to feed or change the baby. Despite Booth's concern that the influenza virus would be transmitted through her breast milk, she reassured him otherwise and for the first few days of her illness did use the pump so that Kathryn could be fed with her mother's own milk. But as the flu lingered into the fourth and fifth days, with her fever spiking when she didn't take any medicine to lower it, she began to produce less and less milk, until by the sixth day, she couldn't pump enough to feed her daughter. _

_Although she tried not to show it, Booth knew that she'd felt bad about not being able to pump any more breastmilk and they'd had to rely on store-bought baby formula to do what she'd planned on doing for her daughter herself. She watched him sitting on the opposite side of the bed, cradling the tiny child in his arms as he fed her a bottle of formula. His heart sank at seeing the despair in Brennan's eyes, both at the loss of her breast milk as well as, perhaps even more so, the fact that she couldn't hold her daughter lest she pass the flu virus to her._

"_Bones," he said to her, his voice low and soothing as he patted her thigh as she lay there under a thermal blanket and a down comforter. "It's okay," he told her consolingly. "These things happen. Kathryn's gonna be just fine, alright? So she lost a little bit more weight than the ten percent you said she would. So what? Big deal. She's okay." He pointed at her to illustrate his point. "I mean, just look at her. She's as healthy as a horse, lass. She's fine." He paused for a beat and then shook his head. "No, scratch that. She's better than fine. She's great."_

_Frowning at him, Brennan said, in a voice that Booth knew was more than a tad hormonal as her body adjusted to the fact that it was no longer pregnant. "My baby's starving," she said. "And it's all my fault."_

"_Come on, Bren," he said, a certain pleading glint in his warm, glistening brown eyes. "Kathryn's not starving." He looked down at his daughter whose little hands clung to the side of the bottle her father held, kneading it with her tiny fingers as if by doing so she could get the milk to flow faster. He stroked the underside of his daughter's arm with his long, thick finger. "Look at these chubby little arms, lass. She's hardly starving. You said yourself she'd lose 'approximately' ten percent of her weight in the first week or so. Okay, so she's dropped a few ounces more than that. It's no big deal." He gave the little girl's arm another little poke with his finger then looked up at his wife and smiled. "Besides, we got that nice Cuisinart blender in the kitchen, and we can whip her up a burger, fries and vanilla milkshake in no time flat. We can even add a little cheese and bacon to juice up the calories." _

_Brennan grunted as she shifted her position in bed, pulling the covers more snugly around her shoulders so that she looked like a floating head in a sea of blankets. "Booth," she grumbled with a scowl. "You're not feeding my daughter any of that sludge at just a few weeks of age. She's not even ready to consume simple infant's rice cereal yet…"_

"_It was a joke," he reassured her with a playful yet sympathetic grin. "We'll hold off on the diner food until she's a couple months old, okay?"He tilted his head so that she could see he was just teasing her. When a her tired brow was still creased, he added, "Seriously, though. Don't worry, Bren. You'll get better in no time. And, who knows, maybe some of those magic herbs the OB/GYN suggested will get you going so you can make your own milk again."_

_She frowned and with a sad pout of her lips said, "But...what if I can't?" _

_Booth looked down and watched the baby's mouth work the bottle's nipple, her tiny hands loosely touching the plastic bottle as he rocked her gently in his arms. "Bren," he said, looking up again and reaching out to squeeze her forearm. "It's gonna be okay. If you can't, our little girl will be fine using Enfamil. A lot of women don't breastfeed and their babies turn out just fine—healthy and strong and smart, just like Kathryn's gonna be…"_

_The child in his arms murmured and squirmed a little as she continued to suck rhythmically on the bottle, and he wanted to lean in closer and pull his wife as snugly against his chest as he held their child. Her pert nose was pink, raw from blowing her nose (even though he'd bought her the softest tissues he could find), and her skin was pallid and sticky with feverish sweat. But more than the symptoms of her flu, his heart ached as he searched her eyes for a flicker of something—optimism, or even a willingness to think positively—but he found only disappointment._

"_It'll really be okay," he told her solemnly, trying to embrace her with the deep, warm richness of his voice even as he hung back, rocking Kathryn in his arms as she emptied the bottle of formula. "I promise." _

_After a moment, Brennan slowly nodded. "I know," she said, her voice weak and somewhat broken on the edges. "I just wanted so much for Kathryn to have the best of all things...in this case, the health benefits of breast milk and the developmental advantage of my antibodies and everything else and—"_

_Pulling the tiny child a bit more snugly in the crook of his arm, he leaned across the bed and briefly nudged Brennan's thigh with his head, having already been once scolded for touching her while feeding the baby and risking giving the child the flu. _

"_She loves you," he said, taking a breath as he straightened up again and repositioned the bottle so the little one could have an easier time drawing the warm formula from the quickly-emptying bottle. "She __loves__ you," he repeated. "You're her mom," he said emphatically. "She knows exactly who you are, and you're bonded to her already. And you'll be better in a day or two and you two will be back to the routine in no time." Brennan opened her mouth to interrupt, but Booth brokered no such interruptions from his wife. "But right now," he said firmly, "you need to focus right now on getting better, for yourself and for little baby-bee here. Okay, lass?" He waggled his eyebrows, trying to solicit even the tiniest, faintest smile from her as he glanced down at the almost-empty bottle and stood up from the bed. "Let me get her squared away, okay? And then I'll make you a cup of hot tea with lemon and honey_—_for your sore throat, hmm?"_

_Brennan nodded silently but the sad look in her tired, watery eyes and the frown on her face left little doubt that she was still upset and perhaps a little angry at having contracted the flu when she did. "Okay," she said, reaching for the issue of the _American Journal of Physical Anthropology_ she was reading before Booth came in with Kathryn._

"_Earl Gray or Irish breakfast?" he asked her with a smile as he nudged the nylon nipple between the baby's lips so she could finish off the last little bit in the bottle. The baby smacked her lips and murmured at the movement, clearly not interested in feeding anymore._

His ears echoed with the rhythmic sucking sound of tiny lips on a nylon nipple as he blinked away the memory. After a moment, he realized that the smacking sound of a baby's lips wasn't just a figment of his memory as he turned to look at his daughter, who lay in her car seat, looking calmly, almost watchfully, at him as she sucked loudly on her pacifier.

"You know what you want, huh?" Booth said to the child, narrowing his eyes with a smirk as he watched his little girl work the binky between her lips a couple of times before, a bit playfully he thought, she opened her mouth and spit out her pacifier. She laughed and began to blow bubbles of spittle at him.

"You're a hard case, aren't you?" he asked her. "Just like your mom, hmmm?" The baby stared back at him, and he couldn't help but snicker. "I should've figured as much," he said as much to himself as to the baby. Looking back down at his daughter, he tried once more. "Okay, so even if you are a wonderfully stubborn little girl, why don't you do Daddy a favor, hmm? How's 'bout you take a baby-girl chill-pill and get yourself ready to board the next train to Slumberland so we can make sure your mom's a happy camper when we get back?"

The baby blinked at him, holding her tongue between her tiny lips for a moment as if she were deciding whether to accept his proposal. He couldn't help but grin at the thought that his little girl had inherited that little gesture from him, too.

"Okay, Katie-Bee," he said, taking a different approach with her. "If you don't want to do me a favor, then how's about we make a deal?" He nodded at her seriously. "Your mother's all about driving the bargain, and your older brother Parker is himself not above being bribed…" He paused for a minute as he wondered what he could come up with to tempt a 10-week-old infant. "You know, Parks loves taking bribes—though his usually involve a new video game or an extra-large milkshake at the diner with a bacon cheeseburger and fries. But since you're gonna be all thumbs with the Xbox at this point, and the only milkshake you want is the kind served from Enfamil's formula _du jour_, let's see..."

Shaking his head, Booth reached for burp cloth he kept tucked in near the top of her car seat, just out of the baby's reach, for exactly that purpose. As he began to wipe the baby's mouth, he snapped his fingers and smiled.

"How 'bout if I promise to give you some tummy time, mmm? A little nap on Daddy's chest later today? 'Cause I know how much you like those. Remember, the spot right near my heart where you love to drool when you're sleeping? So what do you say? How does that sound?"

The little girl cooed in response, reaching up with her tiny hand to grab the burp cloth before Booth pulled it away and popped the pacifier back in her mouth. She blinked at him a couple of times before she began to suck on the pacifier again. He gazed into his daughter's eyes, which were the mirror of her mother's and no less entrancing—so much so that it was sometimes eerie to him—and he was unable to keep from smiling as he remembered how those eyes and the willful little mind behind them challenged his grandchilde Spike to a staring contest and won. The thought got him to thinking again about his conversation with the Spike and the reason he asked the vampire to travel down from New York to meet with him in the first place.

"You know, all things considered," Booth began. "Although I'm worried about Buffy and the rest of it, which is why I called Spike here, things have gone pretty easy for me since I found out that the stork was on his way with you." He nodded at her as his low voice loped along and made gentle chit chat that seemed to sedate the excited chi. "Really easy, actually."

He stopped, and as he stared at the baby's blue eyes, which had started to droop, he recalled the words Spike had said to him when he'd asked him how he'd taken the news that he'd be a father again. If there was one thing he'd always known, even before he regained his memories and stumbled into the knowledge of a centuries-long life he never knew he'd, it was that the past is always there, no matter how much time passes or how much the circumstances of the present had strayed from those of the past. He thought back to the night some nine months earlier when Brennan had told him about her impending arrival_. _He shook his head and sighed as he considered how he hadn't really told Spike everything about how Brennan had told him of his impending fatherhood. He hadn't even really told him the half of it, really.

_As Brennan stared at him from where she lay prone on the couch, Booth felt his world spin a bit as a deluge of memories flooded his mind. The red color of the top Brennan wore, in particular, caused his mind to flash to another pissed-off woman who'd once told him he was going to be a father. It was early November 2001, and he was living in Los Angeles, having left Sunnydale to begin a new life for himself in a new city—or, at least, one in which he hadn't been resident in decades, not since sojourning there in the 1950s. He'd spent a single night with his estranged sire in February of that year, but heard nothing from her after that. That is, not until Darla showed up on his doorstep a few months later._

_He remembered watching Darla walk down the steps and into the wide atrium of the Hyperion Hotel, wearing a simple black dress that had hugged the round swell of her belly and a red, fringed shawl that had been draped over her shoulders. Her green eyes had blazed with anger. "What did you do to me?" she'd hissed before she'd drawn her arm back and punched him, sending him flying backwards into the display case of swords that stood five feet behind behind. He remembered how Darla's words had dripped with venom as she'd leaned back on the round couch in the middle of the lobby, palming her belly as she accepted a glass of water from Fred. And, most of all he remembered the lightheaded feeling he'd had as he'd struggled to wrap his mind around the possibility of the impossible having been made real._

"_Why aren't you saying anything?" Brennan asked him, the hurt and confusion and anger she obviously felt clearly tinging her voice in a way that would've tugged at Booth's heart if he'd been paying closer attention. However, she could see a bit of a shell shocked expression on his face as he blinked back at her causing her to prompt him. "Booth?" she asked. "Are you even listening to me?"_

_Booth shook his head vigorously to chase away the unwanted memories and bring his mind back, once again, to the present moment. He squeezed his eyes tightly shut as if doing so would make the present moment more real. _

_Opening his eyes again, he asked her, "Are you serious?" An awkward grin hung on his mouth as he simply stared at her. "I must've misheard you because…" The cold fire in her blue eyes left little doubt in his addled, confused mind that he had, indeed, heard her correctly. For a moment he just stood there, his mouth hanging open in stunned disbelief as he struggled to even breathe. "I mean, wow," he said, scratching his head. "I can't believe it, Bones."_

_Brennan shot him a hard look before she finally spoke. "Believe it, Booth," she told him. "Because it's real, and it's __definitely__ happened." She stopped again, pausing for a beat as she shook her head and muttered more to herself than for his benefit, "I should've known how much trouble I was in when you took me on that damn trip down memory lane there, fucking me like you did on the table for round one, and then taking me for rounds two and three in the bedroom back there—"_

"_What are you talking about, Bones?" he asked, his forehead wrinkled in confusion as his mind was still awash in a thousand different competing thoughts. "Memory lane...what?"_

_Brennan sighed loudly. "You know what I'm talking about, Booth," she said. Under ordinary circumstances, she might have even found his wide-eyed confusion appealing in a way, but these circumstances were far from ordinary and her usual willingness to banter was reduced to nil. His eyes were narrowed under deeply furrowed brows as he looked from side to side as if some unseen being was there to bail him out of his own puzzlement. With an exasperated sigh, she shook her head and said, "Darla told me about how you two'd fucked three times that night you conceived Connor_—_"_

"_No—stop, hang on," he said, holding his hands up. "That's got nothing to do with…" Booth blinked and grimaced, then looked up again. "Wait," he grunted. "Are you actually tellin' me you actually kept count?" The disbelief was clear in his voice as he gave her a pointed look. "I mean, really?"_

_Scowling again at his words, Brennan almost ignored his protests as she continued snapping at him. "You and I went three rounds on Halloween…" She let her voice trail off for a beat before she frowned slightly and then quickly amended her prior statement,. "Well, at least, that is, assuming we reset the metaphorical trip odometer after breakfast the next morning, which would have then recorded another ten round trips before the clock struck midnight on All Soul's…."_

_Her blunt reference to their decadence and his endurance during those two days dampened Booth's indignation as a crooked grin broke across his face. "Heh," he chuckled, shrugging away a shiver at the memory. _

_Much of that whole three days was a blur of sex and sweat punctuated by naps, groggy but delirious wake-up calls at one another's capable hands or mouths, showers, snacks followed by more sex and sweat. Only Brennan's presently withering stare kept him from getting hard just thinking about it. Thirteen times they made love—or just plain fucked—in the two and a half days after he recovered his memories of the lives he lived as Liam, Angelus and Angel. He hadn't known he was capable of such a feat anymore since he no longer had the stamina he'd once possessed as a vampire, and the thought that he had, in fact, performed that well, for that long, that many times, made him grin, blush and puff out his chest with irrepressible masculine pride. _

"_Yeah, that was pretty epic, wasn't it?" _

_Brennan arched an eyebrow. "We barely managed to leave the loft for a couple of hours," she said, "which was just long enough to run down to your local parish and talk your priest into squeezing us in for a quick nuptial ceremony in the rectory after the All Saints' mass, then swing by Thai Village for some carryout, Calvert Woodley's for a few bottles of wine_—"

"_Good__ wine," he suddenly interjected, the earlier defensiveness that had colored his voice quickly returning. "Very good wine, actually, because I'm not the type of guy who'd cheap out his bride on her wedding night, Bones."_

_Brennan blinked at him for a few times and then conceded the point. "Fine," she nodded. "You're right. It __was__ very good wine."_

_Giving her a slightly mollified nod of his own, Booth said, "Damn right it was."_

"_But regardless of the quality of the wine you purchased for our consumption," she quickly countered. "We barely had enough time to eat our dinner and drink the wine before you were dragging me back towards the bedroom."_

"_I couldn't help it," he told her with a crooked grin. "You were so fucking sexy, I couldn't wait to get you home and hit the sheets again because I couldn't get enough of you. Feeling you, and being inside of you after so long, Bren, it was just so fuckin' amazing that I just wanted to drown myself in you. I didn't want to think about anyone or anything else that was the shitstorm of my very fucked up life at the moment." He nodded at her. "I mean, can you blame me?"_

_Brennan's eyes narrowed and blinked several times before she finally spoke to him. "So," she began. For a moment she just stared at him. "The truth finally comes out," she said, her voice teetering on the edge of an exhausted sigh for a moment. "You finally admit it, huh? You really were just drowning your troubles in sex after all, weren't you, Booth?"_

"_What?" he coughed, his brow furrowing deeply and sloping low over his dark, narrowed eyes as his lip curled in scrunch-nosed confusion. "No, I-I...no." He shook his head vehemently. "What are you talking about?"_

_She rolled her eyes. "Oh, please," she said with a rattling sigh. "You were moodier in that first week than I've ever seen you, and I've spent nearly a century observing the oft-times wild swing of your moods. You batted the whole cycle there, Booth—from jovial to despondent to overwhelmed and back again, spending a few hours in a good, solid brood before dragging yourself out of it again for just long enough to fuck a few times before the brooding started again. Sometimes you were so deeply in a funk that you were a growling, scowling mess even mid-fuck."_

_The heavy mantle of Booth's brow lightened and lifted as comprehension dawned on him. He quickly looked away, his brown eyes fluttering as he remembered the whirlpool of emotions he felt in those days and the way that loving her seemed to calm the storm inside of him, if only for a while. _

"_Now wait just a damn minute," he protested. "That's not fair, Bren—"_

"_What's it with you and knocking up women after drowning your angst in back-to-back sessions of wild, unrestrained sex?" she asked. "I'll try not to get too offended that I didn't even merit a bed for our first go...while you started her off against a wall and moved on to a table, at least you and Darla managed to get to a bed before you nailed her the first time that night."_

_Booth stood there for a moment, remembering not just his night with Darla, but the time a year or so earlier when he took Buffy on his kitchen table, the first time they had sex on the solitary day he'd become human. Less than twenty-four hours later, he went to the Powers That Be and asked them to dial back the clock and unwind the events of that day leaving only him—thankfully, he now knew—with the memories of what had happened. He shuddered at the thought of how difficult it would've been to keep Buffy at a distance if the Slayer had actually remembered the day they spent in his bed, making love and talking about a life in which he was human and they could've some semblance of a normal life together. It turned his stomach to think that he might've decided differently. _

"_It's not the first time a table worked for the first round of a..." His voice trailed off as Brennan's eyes suddenly narrowed, and he suddenly realized that he'd spoken his errant thoughts out loud. He swallowed, and his lips pursed together, silently forming the first syllable of Buffy's name before Brennan cut off his train of thought._

"_Don't you dare even speak her name," she said, guessing by the faint smile that flashed across his lips and the nostalgic glint in his chocolate eyes that the woman he spoke of was not his sire, but rather a woman with whom he'd enjoyed a uniquely intense emotional connection….and since it wasn't __her__, Brennan knew it could only be one other person. "You do __not__ want to finish whatever you thought you wanted to say." _

"_What?" Booth coughed, stumbling to recover from his verbal bungle. "Wait—so you actually talked to Darla about the night she and I had sex?" He leaned his head back and sighed. "Knowing how I felt about you two being pals again after everything she did to me?" His shoulders tensed at the thought of the row that he and Brennan had gotten into years before which, in part, was what drove him to Sunnydale and, ultimately, into the arms of the Slayer. "For fuck's sake, really?" he grumbled. "And you got into details, like how and how many times?" _

_Brennan gave him a wordless response as she shrugged her shoulders. _

_Booth arched his head back and sighed, closing his eyes as he imagined his longtime lover and his sire sitting in the living room of Brennan's old apartment in Chicago, comparing notes about their sexual experiences with him. Between the fact that both women were hundreds of years old and promiscuous enough to have had scores, if not hundreds, of lovers over the centuries, Darla having made a living as a prostitute in early years of the seventeenth century and Brennan's lack of shame and overall bluntness, he was pretty sure that the two women had talked about their fucking. He wondered if they talked about how they worked him over, or just how he'd worked them over. With a silent groan, he imagined Brennan rattling off statistics about the average size, length and girth of human penises and how he rated in that respect. _

"_Shit," he sighed. "You two were worse than you and Angela."_

"_Darla and I always kept in touch, Booth," she answered. "You know that. I've always been quite open with you, as I'm sure you recall, where Darla is concerned. I've never had any secrets or tried to hide that." She paused for a beat, then smirked slyly. "Not that I can say the same for you as either Angelus or Angel." Brennan allowed the pointed comment to hang in the air between them for a moment, then dismissed the comment with a wave of her hand. "But, be that as it may, I knew her long before I met you. And, yes, she was always...well...fairly open with me about things, especially when it came to you." _

_She smirked at seeing Booth blush. His modesty, which at one time she would have mistaken for a Puritanical streak had she not known better, was something that his soulless self had never shown. Instead, it seemed to come with his ensoulment, and when Angel was yanked from L.A. and given a new life, cleaved as it was to the life and memories of a churchgoing Catholic Army vet turned FBI agent, it became even more pronounced. But all along, she'd known that somewhere beneath his buttoned-up exterior was the same ravenous sexual appetite and skilled lover who had driven her wild for over a hundred fifty years._

_Brennan thought about the strange dichotomy of his reticence to open discuss sex and things touching on sex, on the one hand, and the feverish enthusiasm with which he loved her behind closed doors. She remembered the night she found out that he'd been with his sire again after nearly a century. A dark wave of sobriety washed over her as she remembered how that night was the last time she ever saw Darla. _

"_She came to see me, before she came to L.A.," she said vaguely. "She came to see me in Chicago."_

"_Hmmm?" Booth asked. "What do you mean?_

"_She came to me," Brennan explained with a nod of her head. "It was actually the last time that I ever saw her alive. She told me she was pregnant, which surprised the hell out of me since last I'd heard from Spike you'd staked her to pacify the Mid-Life Crisis, enough so I nearly fell out of my chair when she showed up at my loft, not only alive, but pregnant...and then she told me. Then she told me it was yours, and—"_

"_What?" Booth grunted. "Wait a minute." He shook his head as he muttered, "Stop."_

_Brennan arched an eyebrow at him, but as he'd strongly requested, she paused in her would-be diatribe. _

_Her pause gave Booth a chance to let his brain catch up with the random barrage of important things that Brennan had just said. At last, he focused on one of them and asked, "She told you before she told me?" _

_His eyes widened in surprise then narrowed sharply as he frowned, his deep-set brown eyes seemingly disappearing beneath the low-slung furrow of his dark, heavy brow. She saw his jaw harden, and slacken again as his mouth fell open in shock._

"_I can't fucking believe it," he spat indignantly. "You knew I was gonna be a father before I did? That's..." He huffed a hard breath through flared nostrils as he ran a hand through his short-cut hair. "Fuck…" he sighed with a sharp shake of his head. "That's wrong, Bren. It's just...wrong."_

_Brennan shrugged at his slight tirade, clearly unimpressed as she responded simply.. "Darla was never one for observing social conventions," she said. "She considered me a friend, Booth. Her oldest friend, as it were. She was worried_—_terrified, really_—_and she needed someone to talk to." _

_Booth remained silent for a few moments as a wave of sympathy washed over him. For all the pain and destruction and suffering that Darla left in her wake and the way she'd abandoned him, flushing him out of her life as soon as she realized that his blood-lust had all but evaporated away in the wake of the Gypsy curse that ensouled him, the thought of her feeling terror and uncertainty because of what he'd done to her nonetheless caused him a twinge of guilt._

"_She came to you?" he asked, his voice soft and hesitant as he winced, bracing himself for confirmation of what he already know to be true._

_The forensic anthropologist saw the change in his countenance and then slowly nodded. "Yes," Brennan said matter-of-factly. "And, as I said, I was shocked to see her, since last I'd heard she was dead—dead at your hands, according to William, all because you wanted to impress a little teenage twit." Her voice dripped with acrid sarcasm that left little doubt that, years later, she still viewed the episode and her lover's stay in Sunnydale with bitterness and anger._

_Booth scowled. "That's not how it was," he snapped. "Darla was the one who was killing to impress. After four centuries, she was still at the Master's beck and call, and he wanted Buffy dead so he would be able to operate from the Hellmouth with impunity. She wanted to see Buffy dead and just drew me out in the process." His gaze grew distant as he recalled the night he found Darla in Sunnydale's all-ages nightclub, The Bronze, and how he'd staked her to protect Buffy and end Darla's killing rampage. "I didn't do it to impress anyone," he said, carefully omitting his former lover's name, which was like nitroglycerin to the witch, whose long-simmering hurt and resentment had never fully burned away and was prone to explode into a violent rage at the mere mention of the Slayer. "I did it to save lives." _

_Unable to help herself, Brennan rolled her eyes a bit, her jaw tightening in a certain tell-tale way that happened whenever she spoke of the Slayer. Taking a breath, she waited for a moment to keep some of the snarkier comments she had on the tip of her tongue from falling away. When at last she spoke, it was still somewhat in what Booth could tell was an annoyed voice. _

"_Very convenient, then," Brennan grumbled, drawing a deep breath as she tried to set aside the feelings that thoughts of the Slayer always brought up in her. "In any event," she said, "that's why I was surprised to see her show up on my doorstep a few years later, pregnant with a child that she said was yours. And, though I wouldn't have believed it possible, my natural tendency towards disbelief was more or less suspended after I opened my door to an eight-months' pregnant vampire who had come back from the Great Beyond, so to speak."_

_Booth shook his head and breathed a rattling, throaty sigh. "You knew before I did," he said. He felt a hard, dark ache in his chest as he thought about his sons, and how he'd never been able to be the father to them that he'd wanted to be—that they'd deserved to have. It was bad enough that he hadn't been able to be there during his son Parker's earliest years. That he hadn't even known that Darla was pregnant with his child—that she had chosen to tell others before him about the existence of his own son—still made him physically ill to think about even though he knew he wasn't being fair to hold it against Brennan. He sighed even as he heard her finally speak once again._

"_Darla and I had a long history," she said. "A far longer history between us than either of us had with you, besides the fact that such conversations are the purview of individuals of the same gender." Brennan studied her husband's face, the stony features of which left little doubt as to his resentment. "So, yes, Booth. There are some things. as a male, that you would not be privy to necessarily before I would learn them as a female. Combined with the length of our personal affinity, does this really surprise you?"_

_Intellectually, he knew she was right, especially since the two of them had been estranged for several years when he and Darla slept together. And yet, on some level, hearing her say it aloud made his chest ache. It made the catastrophe of their falling-out in the late 1990s seem all that more painful to hear her say that, despite the fact that he harbored a third of her soul inside of him, they had been far enough apart that she kept secrets from him. A tiny voice in the back of his head wondered if that was still true._

"_It's still wrong," Booth grumbled, his brow knit low over his eyes and his lips pursed petulantly. "Whether you think so or not, it's just not right…"_

_Brennan waved her hand as if to brush away the digression. "In any case," she said, "you'll be glad to know that, this time, you're the first to know." She paused for a moment as she recalled the first few days after she began to suspect the cause of the symptoms that had rendered her normally perfect health less than otherwise. Her nose crinkled as she thought about the 'hypothetical' situation she'd discussed with several individuals much wiser than herself in order to confirm the potentiality of a possible pregnancy. Although she'd left such discussions without technically confirming her condition, she'd had a pretty good idea of the truth of the matter, which in turn, had led her to have this discussion with Booth. Still, realizing now was not the time to share such things, she completed her thought, which was, from a certain perspective, the truth of the matter when she said, "Well, at least, other than me, of course."_

_Booth felt a fluttering sensation in his gut as he looked at Brennan's still-flat belly and thought of the child—__their__ child—growing inside of her. He thought of his other children—Connor, and his 'normal' son, Parker, who was the son of the normal human life to which he'd been cleaved after Brennan rescued him from L.A. _

_He remembered the first time he'd held Parker in his arms, and how tiny he'd seemed as he lay there, a squirmy, mewling bundle swaddled in a hospital-issue blanket. He'd still been in the Army then, and he'd had to go AWOL so that he could be present at the birth of his son. Booth had only cradled Parker in his arms for a minute or two when the calm silence of the birthing room was shattered by the sound of Walter Sherman and another Army MP barging in. He'd only managed to cuddle Parker against his chest for a fleeting moment before Walter had forced him to give the cooing baby back to Rebecca and escorted him out of the room before he'd slapped a handcuff around the Booth's wrist. Looking back on the memory, he recalled how Walter had hesitated for a few seconds, as if he knew Booth wanted just another few moments with his newborn son before he was taken into custody and returned to Fort Benning, but he was at least grateful the MP hadn't taken him into custody in front of his newborn son. _

_Booth then he remembered standing in the lobby of the Hyperion when he'd cradled another newborn baby boy. He'd held Connor in his arms, the babe tightly swaddled in a plain white receiving blanket, warm and dry despite the cold, driving rain into which he was born the moment his mother, Darla, had staked herself so that he would live. Lorne had come in, rushing forward and demanding to hold the newborn, but Angel had merely held the infant even closer to his chest. He hadn't wanted to let him go, not for a moment, but he'd eventually been forced to give up Connor just like Walter had made him give up Parker._

_When he'd first learned that the impossible had happened and Darla was pregnant, it had taken awhile for the concept to percolate through the layers of his mind and become real. But gradually, the reality of it sank in, and a part of Angel that he didn't even know he had—much less understood—became attached to the child, and he couldn't bear to let the wiggling infant out of his arms, not even for a second. It was as if the tiny, mewling bundle was a giant sun at the center of Angel's universe, and suddenly everything in his life realigned to rotate in relation to Connor. If Angel had realized it when it had happened, it might have frightened him, or puzzled him, but in the minutes, hours and days after Connor came into the world, such a realignment of Angel's world happened so quickly and automatically that it nearly passed without notice._

_What weighed so heavily on Angel in the wake of his son's birth was not fatherhood itself—which he took to with the same solemn sense of protective duty that he had towards the other aspects of his life—but rather the danger posed to his vulnerable babe because of his uniqueness. Connor wasn't yet an hour old when a scimitar-wielding demon had crashed in from the Hyperion's courtyard and leaped over the railing, hell-bent to seize or destroy the miraculous child. Thankfully, Gunn's quick reflexes sent a serrated-edged cleaver flying through the air and buried it deep in the demon's chest at the same time that Wes landed a crossbow bolt in the demon's neck. Connor was safe, but the episode left Angel with an unshakeable sense of fear that his child was in constant danger, if not on account of his own miraculous nature, then because of the ongoing war against the powers of darkness that his father waged every day. _

_It was with these memories washing over him that Booth received the news of Brennan's pregnancy with a swirl of competing emotions: happiness at having the chance to be a father again, and to raise a child with the woman he loved more than anything else in the world; dread that strange, unforeseen circumstances might arise that would tear him away from his child, the way he'd been torn from Parker, and the way Connor had been torn from him, and that he would not be able to be to this child the kind of parent the baby deserved; and fear, fear that the work that he did for the FBI would put his child in peril the way his work as a Champion had, in part, made Connor a target for the demonic minions of cosmic darkness. These swirling emotions drained the color from Booth's face and made his gut clench as his heart pounded in his chest. _

"_Stop doing that," Brennan told him, cutting into his memories, her voice sharp and firm in the demand that she made of him. "Stop it."_

"_What?" he rasped._

"_I know that look," she told him, her voice cutting in her appraisal of what was going on in his mind a bit unsettling to him that she knew him that well even though she'd barely said a word to explain what she knew about him. His suspicions were confirmed when Brennan added, "Whatever it is you're thinking about, that's the look you get before you go into a full blown brooding attack. So, please...just don't."_

_Booth furrowed his brow and looked away from her withering gaze with a sigh. "It's just that...well...I don't really know how to explain it, but..."_

_In a matter of mere minutes, Brennan saw her husband wax from bright-eyed, smirking and cocky to doe-eyed, quiet and hesitant. After a century and a half, she'd learned to read his moods well enough, almost like the way a farmer could read the weather from the shapes of clouds on the edge of the horizon and the haze around the moon at moonrise. She felt the tension and uncertainty rolling off of him in palpable waves, and seeing his vulnerability tugged at something deep inside of her. A part of her, still shocked at the notion that she was actually pregnant, wanted to feel angry, but another part of her—the larger part of her that had loved him for almost a century—wanted to comfort him. Comforting him when his faith in himself was shaken was to her almost like a reflex, and so she set aside her frustration and her anger to reach for him the way she had so many times before. _

"_You're scared," she said, finishing his sentence for him. "I know that."_

"_I guess it's stupid," Booth said. "I'm happy, you know. I'm happy we're gonna be having a baby. It's a dream, really, but..." His voice trailed off as he swallowed firmly and took a deep breath. "I want to be a good father for our baby, a better father for our child than I was for Parker, or..." He blinked away an errant tear. "You know, for Connor, and...I owe it to you, Bones, and to this baby, to be a good dad. A better dad than my dad was...than I was to my boys. And, well, it's just..."_

_Brennan was quiet for a moment and then struggled to sit up so that she was looking at him with a level stare. She waved him off as she grunted and tossed the damp cloth that she'd had on her forehead onto the coffee table where it landed with a splat. "You know," she began. "When you've been on this earth for almost five centuries, it's not often that something happens where I have absolutely no point of reference for it...no chance to say that I've done something like that before."_

"_I know, Bones," he said quietly. "You're gonna be a great mom, though. I know it."_

"_I concur," she told him, her voice even yet audibly strained. "But, you have to understand two things right now. First...and I'm sure it's the less important of the two, I'm extremely frustrated and angry right now. I'm certain there's a scientific explanation that would offer a hormonal reason as to why I'm having these aggressive feelings towards you, but...and I can't believe I'm saying this...but, for once, the science is less important than the fact that I'm quite pissed off." She stopped as she let her eyes flash the intensity of emotion she felt in that moment to illustrate her point. She then added, almost as an afterthought, "And, second...and more importantly...I'm not her, Booth. I'm not Darla."_

_A faint smile flashed across Booth's lips. "I know you're not, Bones," he said. "We've been together now, off and on, for..." He paused, counting the years in his mind. "A hundred fifty years now? And bound to each other, soul to soul, for eighty some-odd years, right? I __know__ you're not her. You and I know one another the way we know ourselves." He fell silent again, glancing down at the floor for a moment, then raised his eyes up to meet hers. "I'll probably be sorry I asked, but, why are you feeling aggressive and pissed off right now? Is it because you got pregnant, or because of something I did? I mean, you know, aside from the obvious getting you pregnant part."_

"_I'm feeling intense negative emotions for so many reasons I can't even begin to express them," she sighed. "Right now...even if I'd contemplated such a possibility happening between us—and I hadn't, by the by—now is not the time for us to be having a child. Work...your career...my career. To say nothing of our personal relationship and its recent changes..." She sighed again once she let her voice trail off before she squared her jaw and added, "Plus, a part of me is annoyed that if you were going to get me pregnant...well, you weren't very creative about it, were you?"_

_He cocked an eyebrow at him as he stared incredulously at her statement. Eventually, he managed to sputter some type of a response. "Creative?" he coughed. "Oh, so we're back to that again. Jeez." He rolled his eyes then laughed. "Okay, so look—I promise that the next time I do this, the dining room table and brooding on Halloween won't be involved, alright? I'll think up something more original next go-round."_

_Brennan shot him a piercing, narrow-eyed look before she choose not to respond to his teasing taunt. Instead, she stared at him for a moment, then told him, "It's illogical and irrational, but I'm slightly indignant about the lack of creativity on your part."_

"_Umm…" Booth arched a brow as he studied her expression, trying to decide if she was feigning indignation or really was indignant. Concluding that Brennan couldn't maintain a pretense like that for that long, he rolled his eyes again and sighed. "You've got to be kidding," he told her. "I mean, there's only one way __this__ could really happen." He paused and then thought better of his statement and corrected it promptly . "Well, two, I suppose, if ya want to be all scientifically precise like I know you get off on, but since I don't walk around with Petri dishes and pipettes, I-I just...I just did what come naturally." He grinned, an amused light dancing in his eyes for a moment before Brennan's expression suddenly seemed to sour again. _

"_Naturally?" Unable to help herself, Brennan shook her head, goading him a little as she said, "I mean, seriously, Booth. I was only trying to make you feel better, and the first chance you get, what happens? Were you trying to prove something?"_

"_Now, wait a minute, Bones," he said, a crooked grin parting his lips as his crinkled brow carved deep furrows in his wide, masculine forehead. He held his hands up in an outwardly defensive gesture, but the flicker in his warm brown eyes and the bright laughter on the edge of his voice belied his annoyance. "Simmer down there, okay, for just a second. How many times have you and I made love...or had sex...in the last hundred and fifty years?" He gave her a pointed look to emphasize his point. When she remained quiet, he prodded again, "Cat got your tongue there, Bones?" He gave her another nod before he continued."Because I know you've got some squinty goodness even if you can remember that can toss some number at me, so just spill it, hmmm?" he asked her. "How many?"_

_She gave him a blistering glare before she finally answered. "I may be statistically inclined and have an excellent memory, but I have no idea," Brennan said with a shrug of her shoulders. "I'm not so anal-retentive that I keep a log. Especially if we're counting individual times your orgasm has resulted in ejaculation versus prolonged sexual encounters consisting of multiple times when we've engaged in intercourse."_

"_Okay," Booth replied with a laugh. "Right, but it'd be fair to say that there have been, errr, hundreds if not thousands of opportunities for this to happen over the years, wouldn't you say?"_

"_Technically, no," she said with a sharp shake of her head. "Assuming that I was not at risk for impregnation before you regained your human form and became biologically capable of contributing viable sperm to create life, we actually only slept together on three separate occasions, and that includes last Halloween. Remember?"_

"_Alright, look, okay"? he said, the pitch of his voice rising as his frustration mounted. "You know as well as I do that vampires aren't supposed to be able to father kids. So it's not like we ever really got into the habit of using contraceptives. Can you really friggin' blame me when I didn't buck a hundred and fifty year or so habit of being able to fuck you without thinking about that stuff less than a year after I was de-vamped?"_

_Brennan's eyes widened in clear disbelief at his words as she chose to focus on the rather minor point he'd insinuated with his poor word choice. "Oh, really?" she snapped at him. "So I'm just a 'habit' now?"_

"_Aww, fuck." Booth paled a bit as he realized what he'd said. He then shook his head and pointed at her. "Now, don't do that. You know what I meant, and that's not what I meant, so don't twist what I'm saying around into something that it's not. You know what I was saying was that I had gotten used to being able to go at you and make love to you without having to worry about that kinda stuff."_

"_Oh, right," Brennan snickered. "So, what...I'm just supposed to have done, what, Booth?"_

"_You know what, why is this all on me, anyway?" he countered. "It's not like it didn't take two to tango, Bren. You were right there with me, and I didn't notice you stopping to ask me if I minded using a condom...either that first time in your loft or right before the whole fucking magical heebie jeebies did their thing to me or, ya know, at Halloween, so...let's get real, okay? I didn't plan this. It's not like I had some grand master scheme to get you pregnant. I'm good, Bones, but I'm not __that__ good. It's not like I stood there and set my sperm to 'stun' before we fucked, Bren."_

_Perking up, some color returned to Brennan's face as she straightened her back again and leaned in a bit towards him. "Oh, wait. So this is on me because I didn't stop you? Tell me, Booth. When would that have been doable? At what point do you think I should've brought that idea up? When would it have been a good time to interrupt you in between the points when you sliced and diced my Wonder Woman costume and when you tossed me up on the dining room table and started pounding into me? When would have been a good time, huh?"_

"_Okay," Booth said with a throaty snort. "Fine. I'm not going to win this one. It doesn't matter that I wasn't thinking straight that night because I'd just gotten an instant infusion of three lifetimes' worth of memories, many of them traumatic as fuck, in the span of an hour. But it doesn't matter." _

_The first sign that her mood had shifted was not anything she said, but in what she did. It was slight at first as her bottom lip began to tremble slightly, she paled, and then her blue eyes started to water. After another minute, she still didn't say anything, and he merely stared at her as he waited to see what she would say. While she remained quiet, she began to furiously blink her eyes open and shut as she tried to will away the water that threatened to overwhelm her tear ducts._

"_Bones," Booth said quietly, sitting down on the sofa next to her, his chest aching as she sat there, her lip trembling and her beautiful blue eyes shimmering. "Listen, okay? I __love__ you. I love you more than anything. It's gonna be okay."_

"_I know you love me," she told him in a croaky voice. "And I'm sorry. I'm so sorry for what I did. I've tried...that night, I was trying to make it right. But...God, you still blame me, don't you?"_

"_There's nothing to blame anybody for, Bones," he said. "This is a good thing, okay? I mean, hey, am I a little scared? Sure. I'll admit it. But I'm happy about this. I love you, and the idea of you and me, in our normal lives that we're living now—mostly normal, that is—having a baby?" _

_Booth smiled and breathed a dreamy sigh, his own gaze beginning to shimmer a little as his dark brows arched over his eyes and he found himself looking at Brennan's still-flat belly. He wanted to reach out and palm that belly, to touch with love and wonder the place where their child was growing inside of her. He felt his chest swell with warmth and pride with each breath as he brought his gaze back up to meet hers._

"_God, Bones," he said, his voice ringing brightly as his smile stretched from ear to ear. "I mean...that's the best. I never imagined we'd get a shot at this good a life, you and me. So, yeah...I'm crazy ecstatic about this. I love this baby already, Bones. So there's no blame. Don't even think about that. This is good news, right?"_

_Brennan sighed as she saw the sweet, happy wonder on his wide-eyed, grinning face and felt a twinge of what she could only describe as envy as she battled with her emotions. He waggled his brows and gave her a pleading look with pursed lips that seemed even pinker against the contrast of two days' worth of dark stubble. "You're asking me to focus on the macro-level," she told him, sniffling in a way that seemed offensive to her._

"_Yeah, Bones," he said with a grin. "I'm a macro kind of guy."_

_She was quiet for a minute, gathering her scattered thoughts before she sniffled again and then sighed. _

"_Do you know how hard that is, right now? Brennan finally asked him. "I can't even contemplate the hows and you want me to think about the whatfores and whys. I've spent the last four weeks exhausted. The last two weeks have made the time I contracted West Nile Fever seem to be an enjoyable frolic. And, thankfully...before now at least, by confining my focus to the micro, I was able to avoid having to think about the fact that when I was born, I effectively signed __my__ mother's death sentence. So, I don't know how to answer that question, Booth. Not without opening a number of metaphorical cans with which I have no idea when I'll be capable of facing let alone ready to address."_

_Booth rolled his lips between his teeth and sighed before he spoke. "I know, Bones," he said. "I know this is a lot of shit to process, for you and for me. But, well...I think there's one big picture question we need to answer pretty soon here." _

_He took a breath before he looked at her. Seeing the uncertainty in her eyes, he felt two distinct waves of emotion crash over him—first, sympathy for her, knowing as he did how it felt to have one's life and very idea of self turned upside down and inside out all in the blink of an eye, and second, a flicker of concern as he heard in her admission and in the anger that preceded it a woman who didn't want to be pregnant, who didn't want to have his child. The two feelings tugged hard inside of him and swirled together in his gut in a way that drained some of the color from his normally florid cheeks. _

"_What I'm saying here is...well...I mean, Bones—do you want this baby? Do you want this child? Because if you do, then we can do this, even if the timing isn't perfect. You and me, Bones, we have been through a lot together. We're amazing together. We're one life. We can do this, Bones. If you want this child, and I'm tellin' ya, I do, then let's have a baby. Let's do it…" _

_He fell silent, his closed-mouth smile widening in a quick pulse as he raised his brows encouragingly. Brennan's expression held as her sniffly nose twitched and she reached up to rub the moisture from her eyes, and he felt a flash of gut-dropping fear, as if the floor below his feed had suddenly opened up underneath him. _

"_But…" He hesitated for just a moment before he swallowed the knot that had suddenly formed in the back of his throat. Pushing it away, he coughed and then said, "If you don't—if you don't want this baby, well, then we'll figure out how to handle that, too."_

_Booth looked deeply into her eyes and searched for the answer to the question that tugged at his heart, but which he couldn't bring himself to utter aloud lest she take his query as a suggestion and jump on it. He wanted this baby. And even though he'd only known of its existence for a few minutes, as much as he knew he wanted this child, he wanted her to want it, too...almost as much, if not more. The idea of her not wanting to keep their child, and the thought of what might happen to that child then, was almost too painful for him to imagine. Stll, he knew it was ultimately a choice that had to be made...for better or for worse._

_Swallowing heavily, he finished his statement as he looked directly into her eyes. "Okay, lass?" he said, his words catching in his throat as he tried to focus on her and not on the fear he felt in his gut. "Whatever you want to do, that's how we'll handle it. And everything else? It can wait, okay? So...just tell me what you want." _

_She pursed her lips together for a minute and then gave him a strange look as she said vaguely, "Whether I've realized it or not, apparently I've already made that decision so it's a moot point to discuss anything beyond the logistics of how we're going to prepare our lives to have this child._

"_What?" he asked with a confused expression on his face. "Huh? What do you mean?"_

_Brennan sighed as she explained to him. "In four hundred and seventy-six years, not once have I ever gotten pregnant, Booth," she said. "And, it's not from a lack of sexual partners or opportunities for intercourse to result in a pregnancy, as you well know." _

_He cocked his head slightly, briefly arching a brow as he blinked away the thought of the scores upon scores of men he knew she'd shared a bed with over the years. She met his look and with a fleeting twitch of her mouth that reminded him of the fact that, for however many men had shared her bed in the centuries before he'd first drawn breath in Galway, he'd more than made up for lost time once he'd been sired by Darla. Thus, he was willing to bet, many, many more women had shared his (willingly or not) than men had shared hers, and so he blinked away the thought and said nothing as he listened. _

"_It's never happened before now," she continued, not missing a single beat as she spoke, the words tumbling out of her as if she'd thought these same thoughts a thousand times before. "Not a single miscarriage or stillbirth. Not so much as even one false alarm in all that time. So when I determined what the true cause behind my ill health's symptoms was, I consulted a number of...well, the closest thing that might be experts on my type of condition." _

_Booth wondered who such experts were and who it was who, again, seemed to know about a child of his before he did. Puzzled and slightly perturbed, his brow furrowed but, not wanting to interrupt, he merely made a mental note of it as he listened. _

"_The general consensus was...and I'm not saying I agree with them, I'm just repeating what they said, but they seem to believe that with a witch as powerful as I am, I wouldn't have gotten pregnant if I hadn't...on some level—although I must officially preface this by saying I'm not certain I agree with this judgment—but, there was some general level of accord in agreeing that I have enough control and power over things, my own body foremost among them, that if I hadn't wanted to get pregnant, then I wouldn't have."_

_Booth bit the inside of his lip to keep from grinning. "So what are ya sayin' here, lass?" He nodded at her. "Do you...that is, do you want this baby?" he asked, wanting to absolutely certain he understood her, though he really didn't have any doubt. "You really wanna have this kid?"_

_A small smile crept onto her face. However, she tried to push it aside and maintain a serious look as she spoke. "You already know I do, Booth—" She was helpless, though, as her eyes held his gaze, to keep from smiling. The deep brown hue of his eyes brightened to a warm mahogany as his brows flew up, his high cheekbones rose even higher, and his smiling mouth fell open with a breathy laugh. _

"_I have certain demands that must be met, though," she said quickly, her eyes widening and then narrowing as she looked at him, interrupting his ecstatic response._

"_Demands?" Booth snorted, his smile fading as he felt vaguely like he had a century and a half earlier when he was trussed up from her rafters and listening to her dictate the terms of his release from bondage. He didn't mind, ultimately, because he knew that, in the end, all the times that she'd ever bound or restrained him ended up with him being wonderfully rewarded for his patience, and he knew this would be no exception. Unable to suppress his grin any longer, he smiled and said, "So—what are your demands, lass?"_

"_To begin with," she said. "If you don't comply with any dietary requests that I make of you...immediately, I reserve the right to exact fierce and swift retribution."_

_Booth's brow creased and a crooked smirk cracked his face for a few seconds before he licked his lips and wiped it away, leaving behind a mischievous closed-mouth smile. "Are you referring to requests pertaining to food that __I'm__ allowed to eat, or me making a midnight munchies run to satisfy some of your cravings?"_

"_The English translation is, if I want something, you better go and get it for me, as fast as you can, and not ask any questions, and not give me any shit about it," Brennan said. "Agreed?"_

"_Okay," he said with a laugh. "Condition Number One, accepted." He then smirked at her as he asked, "What's next on that list of yours?"_

_She kept a serious face as she responded. "You're expected to comply with requests to address any excess energy I may exhibit in any way I deem to be both acceptable and preferable whenever I make you aware of such an issue," Brennan stipulated. "No questions asked."_

"_Hmmm," Booth murmured. "I'm gonna need to consult my Brennan-English dictionary on that one_—" _He stopped mid-sentence, and then blinked a few times at her as he said, "You know, I don't remember you talking like this all the time. You could cut me some slack from time-to-time and dial the vocab down a notch or ten."_

"_I could," she nodded at him, "But, if I did that, what would happen if I slipped at an inopportune time and said something a bit too colloquial or euphemistic at the lab or when we're at a crime scene?" The seriousness of her gaze belied the teasing in her question. "Then, how would that help but do anything other than undermining the carefully-constructed public persona of a studious academic scholar that I've spent so many years cultivating?"_

"_Oh, whatever, Bones_—" _Booth said with a slightly exaggerated but still playful roll of his eyes. "We both know you just like doing it because you get off on seeing if you can say something that you think I won't get."_

"_Okay, smart guy," she said with a smirk on her face. "Then, what did I just say?"_

"_You said that if you want sex, because your outta-whack pregnancy hormones are turning you into a nympho succubus, I need to get my ass ready to meet those needs pronto," he said with a completely straight face. "Right?"_

"_Tout suite," she specified, her flickering blue eyes skimming over the outline of his face and the curve where his strong neck met his muscular shoulder, the contours of which were readily visible since he'd shed his suit jacket moments after dropping his keys on the hall table. She'd long ago memorized every millimeter of every curve on his body—every bony protrusion, every sinewy tendon, every muscle insertion, every soft or smooth or sensitive or callused spot—so she could see those places, almost feel them, even though he sat there in slacks and a shirt, his pulled slightly loose as he always did at the end of a long day. Her gaze briefly held on the middle of his neck, cracking a smile and licking her lips as she watched his Adam's apple bob in his throat and licking away the tingling feeling she felt in her lips as she recalled the way he'd moan as she sucked at the tender skin at the base of his throat, right over his suprasternal notch. _

"_Whenever, wherever, however, and again...no bitching on your part."_

"_Heh," he chuckled, arching an eyebrow as he wondered briefly whether this pregnancy would find him and his wife/partner doing it in the bathroom at the diner or in the back seat of his FBI-issued Tahoe SUV. "No bitching, roger that. Even if it does make me feel like a piece of meat."_

_Looking at him with pursed lips, Brennan chided him, "Booth—"_

_He laughed and winked as he clarified, "A very grateful piece of meat, that is. Anyway, Condition Number Two, accepted." He nodded once more. "Are there any more?"_

"_Yes, there is," she told him. "One more. And, this one is really important. Perhaps the most important of all of them."_

"_Ruh-roh," Booth said, giving his best Scooby-Doo imitation. "Should I be afraid on this one?" He hesitated as his face probably grew sober for a minute. "Yeah, even I know the answer to that. I probably should."_

"_Yes," she nodded in agreement. "Because, here it is." She paused for dramatic effect before she continued. "If for any reason, you chastise, make fun of, or castigate me for any verbal statements I make, physical and/or emotional reactions I have to any external stimuli, or in any way make general allusions to me 'acting weird' because I'm pregnant, you're going to think the time I strung you up naked in London was a politely fun way to pass the time. Understood?"_

"_Alright," he sighed, letting go of the breath he'd been holding as he silently thanked the saints that her last condition was not going to involve some sort of abstinence or other painful sacrifice on his part, knowing in that moment that, as desirable as she'd always been, he knew he would find her even sexier as her body began to show signs of the child they'd made together in love. "Once again consulting my Brennan-English dictionary," he chuckled, "I'm hearing you say I'm not allowed to tease you about being pregnant, acting pregnant, or doing X, Y or Z because you're pregnant. Did I get that right?"_

"_Or what happens?" she said as she stared at him, answering his question with a question of her own._

"_I get tied up like you were so fond of doing to me back in Victorian times," he replied. "Or at least I'm guessin' it's something kinky like that. Right?" _

_She nodded with a devious glint in her eyes. "Correct," she told him. "Although I wouldn't necessarily downplay the part where I said that it would be worse than that." She arched her eyebrows at him as she then added,"Much worse."_

"_Well," he said with a cocky, crooked grin. "Seeing as how I never thought bein' tied up would end up bein' sexy, never mind some of those other things you did to me, maybe it won't be all that bad after all." He waggled his brow and made a low, humming sound in his throat while the memory of one particular night flashed before his eyes and he remembered the night she brought him to his knees, figuratively speaking, as he begged her to relieve the gut-tugging, ball-tightening agony she'd so skillfully driven him to. "Might even be worth it," he muttered under his breath._

_Brennan gave him a wry smirk. "Be that as it may," she told him. "I wouldn't even think about making any of those pregnancy wise-cracks that are rattling around your head if I were you, Booth." The long, graceful line of her delicately-hewn square jaw suddenly hardened as her pale eyes narrowed slightly with a stony glare that he'd have sworn could have wilted the leaves off a tree. "Understand? I.e., there would be no 'happy endings' for you if you make a stupid wiseass comment that sets me off. Got it?"_

_Booth blinked. "No digs on the pregnant lady," he said quickly, the creases in his forehead reforming as the formality of her speech fell away in favor of the slightly more casual manner and left little doubt that she was absolutely not kidding on this particular count. He thought about saying something more profound or meaningful, but didn't want her to think he was trying to butter her up or that he was making light of what he sensed was, at the root, was a genuine concern on her part. "Okay," he nodded. "No gibes about you bein' knocked up. No teasing the mom-to-be. No problem. Got it." _

_Brennan's face suddenly softened and then fell once more as her stern expression folded into a look of pure vulnerability, anxiety, and rapt insecurity. The shift in her demeanor happened so quickly it seemed to Booth to come out of nowhere. _

"_A mother," she suddenly mumbled, so softly he wasn't sure he heard her right. "Me? Someone's...mother." Her breaths began to come more shallowly and she looked away, as if trying to distract herself from her own thoughts. She started to sniffle again and her chest heaved as she said, "Oh, God. How am I going to do this? I don't know how to be a mother. I barely even remember mine. And, caring for another human being? I don't even have a pet fish that's never died because of me. I mean, I keep the iguana at the lab so that the support staff can take care of it for me in case I forget. And, now? Me? With a baby?"_

_Booth leaned in closer to her, placing his hand gently on the back of her head as he pulled her into an embrace. "Shhh," he said soothingly. "Listen, okay? You're gonna be a great mom, okay? You have a huge heart, Bones, bigger than you think, okay? And you've done a great job of taking care of someone when they needed it, in a situation that was pretty unique." He paused. "You know what I'm talking about here, right?"_

_Her only response was to go from a slight sniffle to a full blown sob as she stared at him for a brief handful of seconds before she shook her head and looked away._

"_You took care of me," he told her, certain that she already know of what he was speaking, but wanting to leave no doubts in her mind as he put his arm around her. "When you found me, in Chicago, I was a train-wreck. On the verge of killing myself. I was dirty, starving, weak, and full of despair. You nursed me back from the brink, and gave me the strength that's sustained me for eighty, goin' on ninety years. That's a pretty big fuckin' deal, Bones."_

_He emphasized his point with a hard arching of his brows which he held for a moment until the softening of her tense jaw signaled her openness and willingness to understand. His lips pursed as he searched her eyes for the flicker of doubt he'd learned to recognize decades before, and when he found nothing but resignation and trust, he gently angled his head to the side and smiled as he gave her shoulder a soft squeeze. After another moment, he narrowed one eye as he continued to study her response. "That was you, lass," he said. That was __all__ you. You did that for me. I have no doubt you are gonna be a good mom, if you can nurse a sad, starving vampire back to health, you know." He turned his head and kissed her cheek. "You'll be a wicked good mom. I, uhhh, mean 'wicked' as in really good. Umm...you're gonna be great, Bones."_

_Her sobbing lessened a bit as she shifted slightly, leaning her head on his shoulder and sucking down a few breaths before she hiccuped. Smacking her lips once, she blinked away some of the tears as she muttered in his ear, "I'm still pissed at you right now." She paused to sniffle again and then laughed through the tears. "Even if I'm crying. And even if I still love you. And even if you're probably right."_

_Booth grinned and kissed her cheek again, letting his lips linger on her warm skin before he pulled them away to speak. "You can be pissed at me," he said. "As long as you still love me. And it's okay to cry, as long as you let me hold you when you do." He brought his lips back to her cheek and smiled into her skin before he added with a soft snicker, "I won't push my luck with the me being right part."_

"_Smart," she muttered as she leaned into him. "Very smart."_

"_I think some of those Bren-brains rubbed off when you gave me that third of your soul," he said with a laugh. "Or maybe it's just one of those 'even a blind squirrel finds an acorn once in awhile' situations."_

"_Probably," she whispered as she yawned and then let her head rest on his shoulder. "Yes, probably purely coincidental."_

"_Mmmm," he murmured with a grin as he stroked her hair under the palm of his hand. "Thanks, Bones."_

Booth's attention was immediately drawn back to the present when he heard the soft snore of the baby coming from the car seat. While he'd been thinking about how she'd come to be in this world, his daughter had apparently dozed off from either fatigue, lack of interest in her father's silent musings, or a combination of the two. Grinning to himself, Booth looked at his watch and realized that if he left now, he might be able to pick up some breakfast from the drive thru for himself and Brennan. Carefully, he reached for the car seat as he moved to secure the baby in the car.

Perhaps it was because he'd been awake for about twenty-six hours by his count and was a little slap-happy by that point, but he had enough presence of mind that he'd just begun whistling an old Irish tune when he stopped himself so that he didn't wake the baby up.

Instead, he merely glanced at his daughter with a smile and whispered to her sleeping form, "Thank God it's Saturday."

* * *

**-tbc-**

* * *

**A/N2: **We're now passed the half-way point in this piece. Three parts remain and Dharmasera _hopes _to have this entire piece in the can be Halloween. We've always liked to set ambitious goals for ourselves. We're happy to report that Booth & Brennan _finally _get into the same space in the next chapter. Wonder how she's going to take it when she finds out Booth took her mustang out for a late night spin...let alone what he was _really _up to? Anyway, we're hoping to post the next part soon. In the meantime, we'd love to get some feedback. As ever, to all our dedicated readers, thanks for reading!~


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